Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Class

Work/labour

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

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

Jasmine Folz Rachel Smith

University of Manchester, University of Aberdeen

Initially published 1 Jul 2024

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Foundational approaches

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

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

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

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

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

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

Division of labour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frontiers and margins of capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industrial labour

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

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

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

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

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

Transformations of work under late capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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White, Leslie A. 1943. “Energy and the evolution of culture.” American Anthropologist 43: 335–56. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1943.45.3.02a00010

Whyte, Martin K. 1978. “Cross-cultural codes dealing with the relative status of women.” Ethnology XVII, no. 2: 211–37. https://doi.org/10.2307/3773145

Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Oakland: University of California Press.

Xiang, Biao. 2007. Global “body shopping”: An Indian labor system in the information technology industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yelvington, Kevin. 1995. Producing power: Ethnicity, gender, and class in a Caribbean workplace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Note on contributors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Debt

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 17:25:24 +0000

Cartoon depicting the former king of Great Britain and Ireland George III receiving funds from Prime Minister William Pitt. Authored by James Gilray in 1786.

Ryan Davey

Cardiff University

Initially published 25 Mar 2024

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

Abstract:

Debt is meant to be about repaying what you owe, but it often accompanies inequality, oppression, and unrest. Responding to this paradox, this entry explores a variety of debt relations that anthropologists have investigated, including personal and household debt, government debt, informal lending, and the collectivised debts of microfinance, as well as gifts, reciprocity, and social interdependency more widely. It considers a debate in anthropology about whether debts of money are akin to reciprocity. Anthropologists have traced the connections between debts of money and reciprocal obligations in a wider sense. Yet the business of lending, borrowing, and repaying (or not repaying) money also differs from other kinds of social interdependency in ways that merit consideration in their own right. The entry explores the violence and dispossession that so often feature in experiences of debt, considering their connection to the rise of quantified obligations in impersonal markets. The coercive quality of debt relations is often latent yet can incite responses ranging from organised collective refusal to optimistic attempts to disregard debt collectors’ demands. The multiple ways in which debts form channels for the extraction of wealth and resources, sometimes known as financial exploitation, mark important shifts in class relations along with new solidarities and divisions. Finally, the entry considers the gendered aspects of debt, which arise through the often-unrecognised labour involved in borrowing or paying on time, as well as debt’s capacity to re-work gender norms and bring new social forms into being.

Introduction

Across the globe, debt and credit are a dominant framing for many economic and political relationships. Such relationships are often extractive, restrictive, or distressing. An excess of subprime mortgage debt in the US in 2008 led to the collapse of financial markets there and subsequently many other places. From the ‘Third World’ debt crisis that started in Mexico in 1982 to 2010s austerity in southern Europe, national governments’ attempts to repay their debts to international creditors have involved structural adjustment, mass unemployment, and rising inequality (Knight 2015; Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998). On the other hand, credit is often associated with the creation of new possibilities and freedoms. It has been touted as a vital means of empowering the poor. Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of the Grameen Bank, which provides small loans to groups of poor people in a type of lending known as microcredit, advocates viewing ‘credit as a human right’.^[1]

Strictly speaking, debt is meant to be about repaying what you owe. Yet while this implies an outward logic of balanced reciprocity, debts so frequently feature in situations of inequality, devastation, and unrest. Exploring this paradox, this entry explores a variety of debt relations that anthropologists have investigated, including personal and household debt, government debt, informal lending, and the collectivised debts of microfinance, as well as gifts, reciprocity, and social interdependency more widely. The entry considers a debate in anthropology about whether debts of money are akin to reciprocity, thinking about what such an analogy enlightens and what it obscures. It then explores debt’s relation to violence and dispossession, and how debts can become channels for the extraction of wealth and resources, marking shifts in class relations and in how accumulation takes place. Finally, the entry considers how gendered dynamics arise through the often-unrecognised labour involved in borrowing or paying on time.

What is debt?

On many counts, anthropologists agree about what debt is. Debt is a kind of social relation: between the debtor who owes something and the creditor who is owed it, as well as often third parties who somehow oversee the repayment.^[2]Economic and common-sense framings of debt acknowledge this simple relational point. Yet anthropologists extend it further. Debts do not merely shape or corrupt pre-existing social ties. Instead, debts powerfully constitute social relations or even sociality itself (Roitman 2003; Schuster 2015). Debt creates a temporal relation, too: it is able ‘to link the present to the past and the future’ by ‘lending concrete resources […] in the present and demanding (or hoping for) a return in the future’ (Peebles 2010, 226).

Debt often appears with credit as ‘an inseparable, dyadic unit’—the one always requiring the other (Peebles 2010, 226). ‘Giving credit’ refers to the act of putting your faith in someone. The phrase implies considering someone to be credible, honourable, and trustworthy (Gregory 2012, 384). Incurring a debt, meanwhile, refers to the idea that once you have received credit from someone, you owe them something in return. Across cultures, when people discuss credit and debt, they tend to understand credit as ‘beneficial and liberating’, yet debt as ‘burdensome and imprisoning’ (Peebles 2010, 226)—in other words, many societies consider that ‘credit is to debt as virtue is to vice’ (Gregory 2012, 386). While this may suggest a neat opposition, the relation between credit and debt is more complex: credit is ‘a shapeshifter’ that is ‘reborn as debt’ after it is obtained (Gregory 2012, 383). The word ‘credit’ can refer to lending (whose opposite is ‘debt’) or a payment into an account (whose opposite is a ‘debit’, an expense out of an account) (Gregory 2012, 382). The meanings of the word ‘debt’ subtly vary as well: usually it means owing an amount of money, yet often the word refers to problems repaying such an amount (sometimes called ‘bad debt’ or ‘debt problems’) or alternatively owing things other than money.

Debt and reciprocity

Credit and debt often operate as reciprocal relations: what is given is later returned, or so it goes. (This picture is complicated below.) Anthropologists have persistently found that debts as reciprocal relations are themselves enmeshed in wider webs of reciprocity, both including and going beyond what might conventionally be described as a debt (Peebles 2010, 228). In post-apartheid South Africa amid ‘a proliferation of credit sources’, many people were borrowers in one capacity and lenders in another (James 2012). Some people loaned out their salaries or state welfare payments at interest, at times to help with repayments on their bank loans. This web of economic relations all premised upon tapping someone else’s income formed a kind of ‘money-go-round’ (James 2012). Similarly, women in rural India, in ‘juggling with debt’, take up microcredit and ‘join it up with countless other debt ties’ including informal and familial lending (Guérin 2014, 41). Debt can thus become a ‘driving force in social life’ (Guérin 2014). Looking at debt in terms of its quality of reciprocity highlights that debts of money tend to spawn multiple versions of themselves at a variety of scales and in apparently distinct social domains.

Anthropologists have connected debts of money with reciprocity and social interdependency in a wider sense, too, including gift-giving and obligations to kin. (See ‘Gender and care’ below.) Incorporating debt into kin ties, Papua New Guineans living in North Queensland, Australia, in the early twenty-first century used mortgages and other financial products to complete the payment of their bridewealth obligations (Sykes 2013). Most typically, links between debt and reciprocity arise in studying gift exchange. Pearl divers in 1990s Eastern Indonesia, for example, participated in a system of trade and debt whereby they tended to be chronically indebted to traders who purchased the divers’ catch in exchange for credit at their stores (Spyer 1997). Entwined with this mundane system, the pearl divers also maintained gift exchange relations with supernatural undersea female spirits whom they called their ‘sea wives’. The divers considered their sea wives to provide them with pearl oysters in exchange for token offerings of food and store-bought goods. As goods cycled between the two realms, the sacred undersea relations both sustained the profane transactions on dry land and formed a utopian alternative to them. For the pearl divers, there was an implied analogy between the two sets of exchange (Spyer 1997).

Anthropologists drawing connections between debts and gifts have drawn inspiration from Bronislaw Malinowski’s analysis of the kula in the Trobriand Islands—a ceremonial practice whereby bracelets and necklaces were transported and exchanged in complementary directions between islands (Malinowski [1922] 2014; Peebles 2010).^{^[3]} Malinowski argued that the ethnographic study of a given phenomenon should involve ‘an exhaustive survey of […] the broadest range possible of its concrete manifestations’, in order to understand how they ‘functionally depend on one another’ ([1922] 2014, 515; in Candea 2019, 81). Hence Malinowski observed a dazzling breadth of interlinked relations of reciprocity. Later anthropologists described the exchange of gifts and the exchange of women (by men) explicitly in terms of debt (Lévi-Strauss [1949] 1969, 265; Leach [1954] 1977, 163), leading to the concept of ‘gift-debt’ (Gregory 2015, 13, 55). This expanded the concept of debt from ‘that simple notion of debt that the lending of money creates’ to include reciprocal obligations in general (Gregory 2012, 380). This has sometimes been seen as anthropology’s quintessential contribution to the understanding of debt (Gregory 2012).^[4] The likening of debt to reciprocity has been helped by broadening the definition of reciprocity. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins proposed a typology of different kinds of reciprocity. He distinguished ‘generalised’ reciprocity, or transactions that are putatively altruistic; ‘balanced’ reciprocity or the direct exchange of things of commensurate worth or utility; and ‘negative’ reciprocity, i.e. the attempt to get something for nothing with impunity. He thereby allowed for the idea of reciprocity, conventionally connoting a to-and-fro, to encompass one-way flows of goods as varied as unbridled generosity and theft (1972, 194–6).

Yet anthropologists have also questioned the merits of re-defining debt from owing money to reciprocity in general. Marcel Mauss’s seminal study of gift exchange ([1925] 2001) is taken by some to be ‘anthropology’s foundational text on credit and debt’ (Peebles 2010, 226). Yet the extent to which Mauss engaged with concepts of credit and debt is contentious. He wrote that ‘the origin of credit is […] the gift’ ([1925] 1974, 34), but he described the obligation to reciprocate a gift as a ‘debt’ only a handful of times and without fully developing a concept of debt per se (e.g. [1925] 2001, 126–8; see also Graeber 2009, 112–3).^[5] Debates around the relation between debt and reciprocal giving go back to the time of Franz Boas—a founder of North American anthropology—and his lesser-known contemporary Edward Curtis (High 2012). Boas studied competitive gift-giving among the Kwakiutl people in North America, a practice known as the potlatch. He wrote that ‘the gift […] is nothing but an interest-bearing loan’, thus likening it to a debt (Boas 1897; in High 2012, 367). Curtis, in his study of the Kwakiutl, came to a different conclusion. Curtis found that the Kwakiutl kept potlatch gift-giving separate from the accounting of debts owed for everyday purchases: only the latter (debts owed on purchases) could ever be explicitly enumerated and called in, whereas with the potlatch it would be considered shamelessly greedy to demand an exact amount in return. As a shorthand, we could describe as ‘Boasian’ the position that debt and reciprocal gift-giving are assimilable, and describe as ‘Curtisian’ the position that they are distinct (High 2012). Inspired by Boas, as well as Malinowski and Mauss, anthropologists have shown how debts foster bonds of solidarity, strengthen hierarchies, and demarcate wider social boundaries (Peebles 2010). They have generated insights that debt is ‘productive’ of new forms of sociality, morality, care, political subjectivity, belonging, social worth, and relatedness (Roitman 2003; Guérin 2014).

Very often the people anthropologists study liken reciprocal and other obligations to debts of money, in a Boasian fashion; or they reflect Friedrich Nietzsche who, ruminating on the likeness between ‘the moral concept Schuld (‘guilt’) [and the] material concept of Schulden (‘debts’)’ (1887, 39), described morality itself as a debt people imagined owing to ancestors, god(s), or the cosmos. (See also a critique of notions of ‘primordial debt’ in Graeber 2009, 121). In Oceania, the Americas, and South Asia, some groups frame ritual and sacred relations explicitly as debts of money (Gregory 2012, 380). In contemporary Vietnam, burning money is a commonplace activity whereby people supply money to ancestors, gods, or ghosts (Kwon 2007). This practice draws on ‘an ancient concept of life as a type of bank loan’ from ‘the treasury of the other world’ or ‘the bank of hell’ (Kwon 2007, 77). In a more profane manner, in 1990s Chile, amid an overwhelming crisis of government debt and an explosion of consumer debt and default, the national government framed its obligations to the poor as a ‘social debt’ and its obligations to those affected by torture under Pinochet as its ‘moral debt’ (Han 2012). Characterising these injustices as debts was a strategy of self-exculpation, however, as the Chilean government implied that upon payment of an amount that it decided unilaterally, those injustices should be forgiven. (Poorer households did not appear to use the word ‘debt’ in this way.) By contrast, in campaigns among Black Americans for reparations for slavery, framing what is owed as a debt is considered by some to be self-defeating (Cooper 2011).

An alternative anthropological approach that does not equate debt with reciprocity, nor even describe debt as a form of exchange, was pioneered in the early 2000s (Roitman 2003; 2005). This approach is sceptical of an unqualified proposition that debt constitutes social relations, because such a proposition without an accompanying analysis of power risks being functionalist, in the sense of presuming consensus, stability, and an overall benignness in social arrangements that may in fact lack them (Roitman 2003, 212). Debt is seen instead to be ‘at the origin of a fundamentally asymmetrical social relation, which breaks with the logic of parity in exchange’ (Sarthou-Lajus 1997, 2; in Roitman 2003, 213), a logic common to viewing debts in terms of gifts and reciprocity. By this alternative view, debt is a ‘structure of dependence’ and ‘a particular condition in human relations […] inherent to the constitution of certain forms of subjectivity and hence […] a historical phenomenon’ (Roitman 2003, 213) rather than a universal feature of human life. This position was enhanced by conceiving of reciprocity more strictly than in Sahlins’ typology, noted above: reciprocal exchange is distinguished from mutualistic relations, hierarchies, and competitive gift-giving, such as the potlatch; and the assumption that human interactions everywhere are a matter of balanced, to-and-fro exchanges is robustly challenged (Graeber 2009; 2011).

As such distinctions underscore, when defaults and non-payment are rife, insisting that credit and debt are reciprocal may be a normative, rather than descriptive, act. The same point applies more broadly when debt is a relationship between institutional creditors and lay debtors. During times of financialisation and crisis, then, Curtis’s position is arguably more fruitful than Boas’s (High 2012). A Curtisian hesitation about identifying debt with reciprocity creates space to attend to debt’s violent and exploitative tendencies, as can be seen in a wave of anthropological scholarship since 2008 (see below). This does not preclude analysis of the imbrication of debts of money with other kinds of social interdependency, but rather calls for semantic precision in how they are all described (e.g. Guérin 2014; Guérin and Venkatasubramanian 2022; Elyachar 2005). There may be ‘a temptation to apply debt reasoning to almost every other relationship one can think of’ (High 2012, 363)—framing what politicians owe their constituents as a social debt, what scholars learn from their mentors as an intellectual debt, morality as a debt to society, family relations as debts to caregivers, or culture as a symbolic debt. But doing so ‘only grinds down the vast array of human action into a single transactional logic’ (High 2012, 365; see also Sneath 2012). We might, therefore, prefer not to ‘collapse all distinctions into debt’ but instead to investigate ‘the distinctions that matter’ (High 2012) to the people in our fieldsites. This includes distinctions between debt and other kinds of obligation, as well as distinctions between different kinds of debt. It is significant that in South Africa, for instance, the term sekôlôtô connotes entrapment in debt while the term lobola refers to long-term reciprocal obligations (James 2014, 22). This underscores the value of reflecting in anthropological analysis people’s subtle uses and significations of the word ‘debt’ and of other words like it, even (or especially) if this goes against some seemingly foundational precepts.

Violence and dispossession

Efforts to distinguish debts of money from social interdependency in general have significantly influenced anthropological understandings of the relation between debt and violence. The anthropologist David Graeber defined debt as ‘an obligation to pay a sum of money’, as opposed to a ‘mere moral obligation’ (2011, 13). Unlike if ‘what was owed was a favour, or gratitude or respect’, with a debt, the human costs are often disregarded since ‘a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified’ and this act of turning ‘morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic [can] justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene’ (Graeber 2011, 13–4). In making this distinction, Graeber identified in debt ‘two elements […] violence and quantification’ that are so closely interwoven that ‘it’s almost impossible to find one without the other’ (2011, 14). While obligations in general do not necessarily have anything to do with violence (see also Englund 2008), Graeber claimed that debts of money generally do (2011). He explained this difference by contrasting market economies, which feature debts of money and where money’s primary purpose is to acquire goods, from ‘human economies’ where any currencies that exist primarily serve to ‘rework relations between people’ (Graeber 2009, 125; 2011). Unlike with human economies, in a market economy, individuals can settle their accounts and never have anything else to do with one another. Shifts from human economies to market economies have involved transitions from currencies with very specific purposes that were used only to pay lip service to something owed of immeasurable value (such as an arm lost in combat or the ability to produce new life), to the general-purpose money used today whose value is considered equal to the thing for which it is offered (Graeber 2009, 121–4). What was instrumental to this transition was violence, especially the violence that made it possible to separate human beings from their social contexts and so treat them as objects of exchange (Graeber 2011, 159). The violence of slavery in particular played a formative role in the rise of impersonal markets, for instance in converting a slave, who supposedly owed their whole life to a particular master, into a slave whose obligation to their master could be quantified so that the slave could be sold to someone else (Graeber 2009, 124–5). Hence states, with their recourse to legitimate violence, and markets, that draw equivalences between people and things, ‘were born together and have always been intertwined’ even though they are commonly assumed to be diametrically opposed (Graeber 2011, 18).^[6] Throughout the growth of impersonal markets, the language of debt has been an extremely effective way ‘to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral’ (Graeber 2011, 5).

At a more mundane level, the coercive quality of relationships between creditors and debtors often becomes patent when creditors attempt to collect or enforce unpaid debts. This includes forcibly dispossessing people of homes, belongings, land, income, or wealth. The violence is often latent and can include ‘subtle or not-so-subtle threats of physical force’ being applied if rules and commands are not followed (Graeber 2012, 105). Lenders’ ‘draconian repossession tactics’ during a nationwide farming crisis in the United States in the 1980s had traumatic effects on farmers, including suicides, social ostracism, and hospitalisation for mental ill-health (Dudley 2000, 40; see also Shah 2012 on indebted farmers’ suicides in India). As both land value and demand for US grain plummeted, lenders required additional collateral and foreclosed loans ‘not because [the farmers] were delinquent or in default, but because their loans had grown “larger” than the value of the property securing them’ (Dudley 2000, 40). Farmers were forced to auction off their land and machinery at low prices, leaving no means of production and a shortfall to repay (Dudley 2000). Likewise, microlending practices, while designed to empower the poor, often involve coercive pressures to repay. In Egypt in the 1990s, NGOs providing microfinancing could, under Egyptian law, take cases of non-payment to criminal courts (unlike the civil courts ordinary banks had to use) and so draw on the repressive apparatus of the state to recover the debt (Elyachar 2005, 199). Even without state enforcement, microfinance loan officers may use coercive pressures from embarrassment to harassment to induce repayments (Kar 2013). With the 2008 global financial crisis, dispossessions took place on a mass scale across North America, Europe, and beyond. In some jurisdictions, money could be taken straight out of household borrowers’ bank accounts if they did not repay (Mikuš 2020). Mortgage repossessions incited a variety of responses among at-risk homeowners, from defaulting to debt refusal and critiques of predatory lenders that reformulated what borrowers owed them (Stout 2019; Sabaté 2016). At times, attempts to enforce debts have been met with embodied defiance—such as with activists in Spain assembling outside the homes of potential evictees to physically obstruct debt enforcement agents and the police (Suarez 2017).

Given the violence of debt, one would be forgiven for thinking that the futures debt inspires are uniformly bleak. Yet as well as fears of being trapped in debt and anxieties about enforcement, debt and credit are also channels for and objects of optimism, hopes, and dreams. In 2010s Britain, the enforcement of household debt, including bailiffs seizing goods or landlords taking eviction proceedings, was a method of securing repayments yet also formed part of a wider structure of expropriation to which poorer working-class households were exposed (Davey 2025). The daily efforts of over-indebted people to ignore the demands made by their creditors, by stashing unopened debt collection letters away or hanging up on telephone calls, is pervasively assumed to be an irrational or irresponsible attempt to wish debts away (Davey 2025). Yet it is better seen as part of an uneven and complexly optimistic struggle against the prospect of lawful coercion, indeed one that often succeeds (Davey 2025). Credit can also render certain hopes possible when there is no obvious violence or enforcement at work. In South Africa after apartheid (James 2015), the would-be members of a new Black middle class took out credit to improve their position in society through university education, bridewealth payments, and mortgages. The expansion of lending thus ‘unleashed aspirations for upward mobility’ (James 2015) that, without credit, would remain tractionless dreams, while more egalitarian hopes fell by the wayside. A similar point holds for student debt and middle-class status in the United States (Zaloom 2019).

Extraction and class

While the ambivalence of debt means it sometimes brings increments of freedom, prosperity, or hope (Guérin and Venkatasubramanian 2022), very often debt relations entail unequal transfers of wealth or resources. These latter processes are variously known as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2009), ‘financial exploitation’ (Saiag 2020b), ‘financial expropriation’ (Lapavitsas 2013a), or ‘predatory debt extraction’ (Stout 2019, 72). The first of these is a way of accumulating wealth that relies on taking things from people rather than from exploiting their productive labour. The concept modifies Marx’s formulation of ‘primitive accumulation’ as an act of dispossessing land and property at the origins of capitalism through Rosa Luxemburg’s insight that such dispossession is on-going ([1913] 2003). Anthropologists studying state debt have explored ways in which debt can be a mechanism for accumulation by dispossession (Roitman 2005; Bear 2015). State debt, also known as government debt or sovereign debt, is what a national government owes to the various bodies from whom it has borrowed money. While state debt crises gained headlines in Europe in the 2010s, in most of the world they are longer-standing (Muehlebach 2016). The geopolitical order since World War II is one whereby international relations are mediated through debts (Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998). Since the 1970s, loans were often conditional on structural adjustment policies which generally did not foster prosperity in Global South countries (Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998). In the 1980s, state debt was financialised, in the sense that the loans given to national governments (known as sovereign debt bonds) became capital on which commercial banks could speculate in order to accumulate wealth (Bear 2015).^[7] At the same time, the control of how sovereign debts would be repaid gradually shifted from the hands of elected politicians to technocrats in central banks, which became increasingly independent from political control. (For ethnographies of central banks, see Holmes & Marcus 2007, Holmes 2009, and Riles 2018) With national governments ever keener to appear like well-behaved debtors, ‘[e]conomic governance became newly constrained by the new public good of interest repayment’ (Bear 2015, 7).

These processes become extractive insofar as states prioritise their debt repayments over providing welfare or alleviating inequality. In 1980s India, sovereign debt transformed from a source of funds for national social investment into a mechanism by which middle-class and institutional investors could extract value from public-sector institutions (Bear 2015, 12–3). This was helped by policy-makers, trained at the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who implemented austerity measures, reducing government spending on public services or requiring governments to get more done with the same funding (Bear 2015). Austerity is a way in which governments remove resources from public ownership and transfer them to commercial banks, the IMF, and the World Bank (Bear and Knight 2017). In the 1990s, the government of Cameroon imposed extreme austerity (Roitman 2005). The once-prosperous Cameroonian economy had experienced a sharp downturn in the 1980s, which had led Cameroon’s international creditors to pressure the Cameroon government to reduce its public expenditure and prioritise its debt repayments. State debt created new channels for continuous economic extraction, in the form of debt repayments and interest payments (Roitman 2005). Hence ‘debt […] generates […] economic and political rents’: regular payments someone receives simply because of owning something (Roitman 2005, 74). This mode of economic extraction takes place through financial and commercial relations, rather than through the exploitation of labour. And yet Cameroon’s austerity did not go unchallenged, with protests and popular rejection of the government’s narrative of what it had to do domestically to service its debts (Roitman 2005).

Another form of accumulation by dispossession takes place through microcredit (Elyachar 2005). Microcredit, also known as microlending or microfinance, involves giving small loans to groups of poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. After widespread criticism of international lending to nation-states and amid state debt crises, microlending was designed to empower the poor. Egyptian microfinance providers aimed to achieve this by ‘financialising [the] social networks’ of the ‘informal’ economy, yet the microloans eventually served as capital by which Egyptian banks could trade on international markets (Elyachar 2005, 194).

Household debts can also work as channels for transfers of wealth and resources. Sometimes called personal debt, household debt includes credit cards, loans, overdraft fees, and mortgages, as well as being ‘in arrears’ (behind on bills) and student loans. Here the terms ‘financial exploitation’ and ‘financial expropriation’ have been suggested. The latter describes a process where households’ reliance on ‘the formal financial system to facilitate access to vital goods and services’ leads to a ‘systematic extraction of financial profits’ from household incomes, and so has ‘an exploitative aspect’ (Lapavitsas 2013b, 794, 801). It is only compounded by ‘securitisation’, a practice whereby banks trade and potentially profit on their loan portfolios (Palomera 2014; Langley 2009). In Argentina, a subproletariat of informal workers and unemployed people living mainly in shantytowns had long been excluded from consumer credit (Saiag 2020a). Yet thanks to a new social protection system of pensions and family allowances introduced by social democratic President Cristina Kirchner (2007-15), every household gained access to a stable monthly income. Consumer lending to this group boomed. It gave rise to a mode of exploiting labour by finance, due to

the mismatch between the time of finance (monthly instalments over the medium to long term) and the time of work (erratic and often short-term) [which] increasingly feeds financial transfers from people’s labour to financial institutions, as debtors structurally fail to honour their instalments on time. This, in turn, exacerbates the existing stratifications within the working class, because those relegated to the most precarious jobs are the most exposed to late fees and penalties (Saiag 2020a, 18).

This mismatch ‘is emblematic of a specific form of capital accumulation, in which a large proportion of the working class remains at the margins of the wage-labour nexus, but is exploited [instead] through financial mechanisms’ (Saiag 2020a, 24).

The Marxian concept of ‘money fetishism’—whereby social relations of production, exploitation, and domination are misrecognised as inherent properties of money as a commodity (as with the notion that money itself has a capacity to generate more money)—enhances the anthropological understanding of exploitation through debt (Mikuš 2019; see also Taussig 1980). Marx believed the appropriation of surplus value through lending and borrowing, as a way of converting money into capital, took place through the charging of interest (Marx 1894, 593; in Mikuš 2019). Close ethnographic attention, however, shows a greater variety and contingency in the lending-related practices involved in appropriating surplus labour (Mikuš 2019). Amid ‘peripheral financialisation’ in Croatia in the 2010s, this included: foreign-currency lenders profiting on cross-border currency differentials and/or shifting exchange rate risks onto borrowers; frequent property repossessions accompanied by bargain auction prices; lenders making it harder for the borrower not to default (e.g. by refusing to renegotiate repayment schedules, or lending to those with precarious incomes); and penalty fees (e.g. for late repayments) (Mikuš 2019). Lending is made profitable thanks precisely to this sheer variety in the forms of money fetishism, as well as from hierarchies within and between markets that allow institutional lenders to manipulate and convert between the different kinds of money fetishism: banks can ‘on-sell’ the risks of borrowing and lending, and borrow in ‘money markets’, for instance, but lay individuals with access only to ‘retail’ or ‘consumer’ credit markets cannot (Mikuš 2019, 301). Islamic finance further complicates the association between debt and interest through the observance of proscriptions on usurious interest, for example through Muslim Americans’ efforts to achieve economic and cultural citizenship with mortgages that fuse Islamic law with US ideologies of opportunity (Maurer 2006).

Processes of financial expropriation often tie closely into the reproduction or transformation of class relations, including shared experiences of (and struggles against) exploitation and domination. In the city of Ferrol, in northern Spain, the extension of personal credit and mortgages in the 2000s fuelled popular aspirations for upward mobility and eroded the city’s tradition of labour organising (Narotzky 2015). An aspirational identity gained ground of being desclasado or ‘un-classed’. And yet once prospects of upward mobility began to fade amid a contraction of credit and wider recession, borrowers who still had to service debts and maintain credit scores began to feel increasingly dominated by their debts (Narotzky 2015). In such contexts, ‘credit and debt [may become] the centre of a new form of class consciousness’ for ordinary employed and unemployed people as well as small-scale entrepreneurs against financial institutions (Narotzky 2015, 67–8). Such experiences of ‘exploitation in the realm of […] consumption’ form ‘the basis of their understanding of systematic dispossession’ (Narotzky 2015, 67–8). The anthropology of debt has thus elicited a re-thinking of class beyond exploitation in the sphere of production to also encompass extraction taking place in the sphere of circulation (Narotzky 2015, 68-9)—or even ‘in social reproduction generally’ (i.e. not limited to any one domain) (Hann and Kalb 2020, 25). Conversely, where mortgages and consumer credit have become widespread, a middle-class identity as self-reliant and enterprising, all pinned on property ownership, can reinforce a tolerance of exploitative working conditions because the imperative to repay debts is tied into status and success (Weiss 2019). Creditor-debtor relationships have arguably ‘replaced labour as the key to value extraction and, perhaps, to class formation’ (Hann and Kalb 2020, 26).

As debt reconfigures class relations, it may spawn new anti-capitalist movements and alliances, as well as nationalist populist ones (Mikuš 2019). Working-class Ecuadorian migrants in 2000s Spain were trying to become part of the global middle classes through subprime (i.e. high-interest, high-risk) mortgage borrowing. When the housing bubble collapsed in 2008, this ‘subprime middle class’ (Suarez 2016) often defaulted; half a million evictions took place in Spain within ten years. Many Ecuadorian migrants joined a social movement, called la Plataforma de afectados por la hipoteca, or ‘la PAH’: ‘the platform for people affected by the mortgage crisis’. La PAH is an example of debt-based collective political action. Its activities include debtor assemblies, in which people with mortgage debt come together to share experiences and give support. While some dismissed this movement of homeowners as middle-class and reformist, it is arguably better seen as a ‘cross-class alliance’ with revolutionary potential (Suarez 2017; see also Gutierrez Garza 2022, Ravelli 2021).

Wider social divisions than overtly class-based ones, too, may be linked to the forms of capital involved in lending. In peripheral neighbourhoods of Barcelona in the 2000s, tensions arose between working-class migrants from the Global South and longer-standing residents (Palomera 2014). The former bought apartments on predatory mortgages and then would sublet two bedrooms to other families so as to afford the repayments while struggling to cover repairs; the latter had bought apartments decades earlier to have one family per home, and thanks to house prices rising some were now moving to more affluent areas. While it may appear that the older Spanish residents were intolerant of new Black migrant neighbours, or had ‘cultural’ differences, it is more fruitful to understand the social fragmentation in terms of changing relations between real estate and financial capital, and the differing relations the two groups had to the Spanish state (Palomera 2014). Recognising finance as a form of capital (distinct from, but entwined with, real estate and productive capital) is thus relevant to understanding many debt-based practices in capitalist societies (Palomera 2014), although anthropologists differ on whether this capital is fictitious or as real as any other (Maurer 2012, 181; Graeber 2014, 75).

Gender and care

As a field of structural inequalities within capitalism, class is, as feminist anthropologists have found, ‘generated within historically shifting dynamics of gender’ as well as sexuality, kinship, and race (Bear et al. 2015). Hence understanding the inequalities of debt involves attending to the ways in which debt-related practices and experiences are often deeply gendered and even a site at which gender norms are produced in the first place or re-worked. Womanhood itself is ‘transformed through debt’ and this transformation in turn feeds financial capitalism (Guérin, Kumar and Venkatasubramanian 2023). When poor women in rural India draw on multiple sources of formal and informal credit, in addition to financial motivations they make deliberate choices to multiply their social relationships (Guérin 2014). These women’s deliberations are gendered, since norms for women to manage household budgets without control over incomes mean they often resort to emergency loans that confer a low status, while also having to anticipate accusations of prostitution for borrowing from non-kin men (Guérin 2014)—a situation that heightens the appeal of microcredit.

Indeed, microfinance is a prime example of how gender is produced through debt. Often, microfinance loans are targeted at women with the aim of bringing about women’s empowerment through financial inclusion (Kar 2018). In India, maintaining access to this credit has become a central part of women’s domestic labour (Kar 2018). The groups organise among themselves the dispersal of credit and the gathering of repayments. The ties among the women thus act as a kind of ‘social collateral’ backing up the repayment (Schuster 2015). In Paraguay, pre-existing familial and neighbourly ties made up only a portion of this social collateral (Schuster 2015). Paraguayan microfinance providers asked relative strangers to rely on one another for credit access and repayment, thus actively shaping the social priorities of its borrowers. The relations among women that microfinance collateralises do not necessarily precede the collective debt, but may rather come into existence upon the debt’s creation and be shaped by its terms (Schuster 2015). Credit can therefore produce a social unit, rather than the social unit always pre-existing the debt (Schuster 2014), as one might assume for, say, family households. Such insights develop feminist analysis by denaturalising the ‘seemingly obvious [social] embeddedness of women’ involved in gendered practices of credit and debt (Schuster 2014, 564).

With household debts, gendered inequalities arise from the demands debt places on caring or reproductive labour. The task of managing debt repayments is often integrated into feminised activities, especially around home and family life (Allon 2014). Amid a boom in consumer credit in Chile in the 2000s, formal credit was often intertwined with familial care (Han 2011). Credit had become ‘a resource in caring’, for instance by buying time for mentally ill or drug-addicted kin to stabilise (Han 2011, 20). Support between households could also ‘mitigate the forces of economic precariousness’, for instance through women’s informal savings and borrowing associations (Han 2011). Yet caring relations also became strained or found their limit when demands for repayment induced ailments in the body of a debtor. Such situations open out ‘the rhythms of the domestic to the calendrics of debt’ (Adkins 2017, 6). Not only are kin and intimate relations central to strategies for dealing with debt, but also growing household indebtedness—such as in Greece in the late 2000s and 2010s—has transformed the household (or oikos) itself by adding credit to the gendered dynamics of dependency, exploitation, and cooperation that constitute it (Kofti 2020, 267-8). Feminist analysis of debt renders visible feminised labour and cautions against positing a universal creditor-debtor relation (cf. Lazzarato 2011), precisely because debt exploits gendered, sexual, racial, and locational differences (Cavallero and Gago 2020). It involves exploring ‘how debt is linked to violence against feminised bodies’, for instance when debt binds women to harmful relationships or is conversely the condition for fleeing (Cavallero and Gago 2020, 6). Studying the household-level processes of converting non-financial assets into more liquid, financial ones shatters assumptions that capitalism somehow occupies a realm distinct from households (Bear et al. 2015).

Conclusion

One of anthropology’s distinctive and long-held contributions to the study of debt has been to trace the social and material connections between debts of money, on the one hand, and reciprocal obligations and social interdependencies in a wider sense, on the other. The anthropology of debt is remarkable for having tended to follow a method of ‘internal comparison’ (Candea 2019, 80–1) that considers analogous phenomena, such as reciprocal relations, within a single fieldsite, rather than only between settings. Yet equally long-standing is a disagreement over whether to equate debt with reciprocity or rather to define debt as owing money. This tension is a virtue of the comparative approach anthropology takes. It is this tension between alternative conceptions of debt, rather than a habit of simply identifying debt with reciprocity irrespective of vernacular definitions and practices, that best encapsulates the value of anthropology’s engagement with debt. Considering debt and reciprocity alike, anthropological research into debt extends as far back as the start of the discipline itself through its vast record of ‘gift-debt’ (Peebles 2010). Yet if we accept that the practice of lending, borrowing, and repaying commodity-money differs in significant ways from other kinds of social interdependency, and so bears consideration in its own right, then anthropology’s inquiries into debts of money arguably begin much more recently. They may begin with ground-breaking studies of state debt emerging in the 1990s (Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998, Roitman 2003), in response to the 1980s crisis, and new work on microcredit (Elyachar 2005) and household debt (Dudley 2000, Maurer 2006, Williams 2004) emerging in the 2000s before a surge of interest in debt in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession (see the authors cited throughout this entry). As Graeber wrote in 2009, debt in this latter sense had received surprisingly little attention in anthropology (2009, 111). Attending to the specificity of debt (and of debts) enables us to ask new questions and draw new comparisons. While research in the 1990s and 2000s on debt across anthropology, the social sciences, and geography often emphasised its cultural aspects (see, as an example, MacKenzie 2006 and the ‘social studies of finance’ approach), anthropological research on debt in the last fifteen years has explored power asymmetries, accumulation, labour, and struggles, along with livelihoods, politics, kinship, and care across multiple scales (Hann and Kalb 2020, 4). Forerunners of this approach include the work of Janet Roitman (2005), Julie Elyachar (2005), and Kathryn Dudley (2000).

It is possible, when exploring the role of violence in enforcing debts of money, to identify subtle inequalities in lenders’ and borrowers’ influence over whether or not violence is exercised. We can do this by asking: how capable is the debtor of preventing violence from being done to them? Research into state debt has shown how it generates new channels for economic extraction in the realm of circulation (or ‘rents’). Household debts, too, involve not only distinctive forms of exploitation arising from mismatched temporalities between work and repayment, but also the expropriations generated by interest payments, penalty fees, predatory lending, and the like—even while fetishising money glosses over the extractive processes at work. Practices and experiences of debt are complexly gendered, as studies of microcredit schemes designed to promote women’s empowerment in the Global South show. These studies highlight the vast contingency of the social formations that constitute a ‘borrower’ or ‘lender’ in any given setting. Feminist research on debt helps to de-familiarise constructs such as ‘the household’ and draws attention to the usually unrecognised labours that go into their continual creation. Indebtedness shapes the way people imagine the future, with debt-based aspirations for household prosperity often leaving existing structures of inequality undisturbed. Yet this does not preclude struggles to envisage liberation beyond the social units in and through which borrowing, repayment, and default take place.

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Note on contributor

Ryan Davey is interested in subjectivity, lawful violence, and political economy in Britain. This includes a forthcoming book titled The personal life of debt (2025, Bristol University Press), based on several years’ work with housing estate residents in southern England. Ryan works as a lecturer in social sciences at Cardiff University.

Dr Ryan Davey, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT. Email: daveyr2@cardiff.ac.uk. Web: https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/daveyr2.

[1] Yunus, Muhammad. 1990. “Credit as a human right.” The New York Times. April 2. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/02/opinion/credit-as-a-human-right.html

[2] In financial capitalist contexts, creditors may also agree with third parties to turn the promise to repay into a tradeable asset.

^[3] Malinowski himself refers to credit, debt, or lending only once, in writing that the kula’s ‘economic mechanism […] is based on a specific form of credit’ ([1922] 2014, 164). Yet his influence on the anthropology of debt makes a brief consideration of his approach worthwhile. Personal correspondence with Marek Mikuš.

[4] While the question of anthropology’s distinctive contribution is fair, at least as much has been learned about debt through interdisciplinary dialogues, including with geography (Harker 2021; Langley 2009), sociology (Deville 2015; Adkins 2017), and political economy (Soederberg 2014).

[5] Differing views on this point may arise in part because different translations of The gift into English make greater or lesser use of the words ‘credit’ and ‘debt’. See Gregory ([1982] 2015, 13) for an account of Mauss indeed writing about credit and debt, based on Ian Cunnison’s 1966 translation (Mauss 1974), and see Graeber (2009, 112) for the alternative view that ‘Mauss never develops this connection [between gift and debt] explicitly’, based on W.D. Hall’s 1990 translation (Mauss 2001).

[6] In Ancient Greece and Rome, for instance, states minted coins, paid soldiers in silver, then demanded subjects pay tax in the same currency, forcing its uptake and enabling soldiers to buy everyday goods, while those with unpaid debts or who were defeated in combat were enslaved (Graeber 2009, 127).

[7] The term ‘financialisation’ refers to a process where ‘the reproduction of societies as a whole becomes more dependent on finance, credit and debt, and on the logic of speculative money capital’ (Hann and Kalb 2020, 1). Research on financialisation has grown in the last decade, tending to focus on the last forty-five years, although making money through lending and borrowing is nothing new (Bear et al. 2015).

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Diabetes

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

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

Shir Lerman Ginzburg

Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Initially published 1 May 2023

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Types of diabetes

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

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

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

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

Structural roots and barriers to care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diabetes and biopower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syndemic interactions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporate influences on diabetes

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

Conclusion

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

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Note on contributor

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

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Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

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.

Neoliberalism

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

Natalie Morningstar

University of Cambridge

Initially published 26 Oct 2020

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Neoliberalism as world system

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neoliberalism as mode of governing

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

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

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

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

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

Ethnographies of the state and labour

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

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

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

After neoliberalism?

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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Note on contributor

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

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

Childhood

Felix Stein — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 09:17:23 +0000

Catherine Allerton

London School of Economics and Political Science

Initially published 4 Jun 2020

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

Abstract:

Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time. But societies differ widely in their understandings of childhood as a distinctive stage of the human life cycle. This entry describes anthropological work on childhood as a varying cultural construction, from early comparative studies of childcare and development, through work on the socialization of young children, to more recent ‘child-focused’ research that takes children’s perspectives on their role and position seriously. Anthropological research casts a critical light on institutional attempts to formulate universal understandings of childhood, whether these are found in developmental psychology, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, or the spread of formal schooling as an essential aspect of modern childhoods. Children, through their participation and observation in social worlds, are always understanding more than they are told by adults, often applying cultural concepts or different languages in innovative ways. This frequently leads children to destabilise or reject wider representations of childhood that reflect adult prejudices, or wider fears about the ‘disappearance’ of childhood or a loss of ‘innocence’. Paradoxically, adult attempts to protect children, whether from work or from societal harms, often say more about the politics of representations of childhood, than they do about children’s actual experiences.

Introduction: children and ‘childhood’

Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time, and descriptions of children’s activities, talk, games, and work appear in many different anthropological texts.^[1] But human societies differ widely in their answers to the questions: ‘who counts as a child?’, ‘what kinds of care and instruction do children need?’ and ‘what knowledge do children have of their worlds?’ The study of these and other questions is part of the cross-cultural comparison of ‘childhood’ as a socio-historical construction that varies widely both across and within different societies.

Anthropological research has demonstrated that there is no single, universal understanding of childhood as a stage of the human life cycle (Montgomery 2009; Lancy 2015). As a result, anthropologists have often cast a critical light on scientific and institutional attempts to make universal pronouncements about children, or to prioritise particular understandings of a ‘normal’ childhood. This includes adopting a critical perspective on developmental psychology as ‘the’ science of childhood.^[2] Most psychological experiments have been conducted with children in what David Lancy (2018) calls ‘WEIRD’ (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) societies. And yet, from the perspective of non-WEIRD societies, such understandings of ‘normal’ childhood are distinctly anomalous. For example, the American psychologist and educator, Stanley G. Hall (1904) defined adolescence as a turbulent and transitional period of ‘storm and stress’, arguing that the physical changes experienced at puberty had a tumultuous impact on young people’s emotional life. By contrast, in Coming of age in Samoa, Margaret Mead disputed this universal picture of adolescent disturbance, asking whether such difficulties were ‘due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?’ (1928: 5). Mead’s book painted a picture of Samoan adolescent girls whose lives were full of leisure, and who did not experience conflicts around their sexuality. Her conclusion was that the ‘storm and stress’ of American adolescence had cultural rather than biological causes, telling us more about the anxieties of American society than about children’s universal experiences. Indeed, later anthropologists have argued that the study of children is crucial to understanding key cultural values and conflicts (Hardman 2001 [1973]; Gilliam & Gulløv 2019).

A key, early influence on anthropological approaches to childhood was Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of childhood (1962), in which he argued that European children in the Middle Ages were seen and treated as little adults, lacking separate clothing, games, or spaces. Ariès thought that the very notion of ‘childhood’ as a distinct phase of life did not exist for most of European history. Although Aries’s arguments, in particular his analysis of representations of children in pictorial art, have been criticised,^[3] his central contention – that concepts of ‘childhood’ varied and that European children’s worlds had not always been so separate from those of adults – had a huge influence on the development of ‘childhood studies’. This is a multi-disciplinary field, in which anthropologists have engaged with sociologists, geographers, historians, and others arguing for a new paradigm for the study of childhood as a social construction.^[4]

Not only do constructions of childhood vary across space and time, but childhood also intersects with other variables, such as social class, gender, and ethnicity. It has been argued that economic and social realities influence ways of treating children, leading, for example, in urban Brazil to ‘two distinct forms of childhood’ (Goldstein 1998: 395). Rich children are pampered and spoiled by their parents and by the domestic workers employed to care for them. By contrast, the very children of those workers are hastened into adulthood, working inside the home from the age of 5 or 6, and sent out to do waged work by the age of 9 or 10.^[5] Childhood – in the sense of a carefree time of freedom and lack of economic responsibility – is a ‘privilege of the rich’ in this context (1998: 393). In America, too, social class shapes attitudes towards childrearing and understandings of children’s natures. The lives of preschool children in New York City have been shown to be marked by a ‘hard individualism’ of working-class communities and a ‘soft individualism’ of the upper-middle-class (Kusserow 2004). Whilst ‘hard’ individualism directs children towards tough resilience, self-sufficiency and independence, ‘soft’ individualism emphasises the importance of protecting and nurturing the child as a unique little person. Here, the conception of childhood held by upper-middle-class parents leads them to dismiss the relevance of social class, since they are led to emphasise the uniqueness and naturalness of their young children’s selves.

Socialization: becoming a cultural person

The ‘Culture and Personality’ school of American cultural anthropology, with which Mead is associated, was interested in how culturally-specific child-rearing practices shaped the emotions and personality of children as a cultural beings. Indeed, Mead herself saw the different peoples of the world as a kind of laboratory of child development, in which each culture presented a different set of experimental conditions for the treatment of children. In a short film, Bathing babies in three cultures (1951), made with Gregory Bateson, Mead showed how something as apparently straightforward as bathing a baby could be approached very differently, the method corresponding not only to the environment but also to a culturally-specific training of the young child’s emotions. Cora Du Bois, another member of this school, conducted fieldwork in the late 1930s on the Indonesian island of Alor, describing the impact of caregiving and disciplinary techniques. Relatively unusually for her time, she also analysed children’s drawings, and conducted Rorschach psychological tests. Du Bois argued that childhood experiences were central to the development of the ‘modal personality’, or common personality type, of a particular culture. However, she also acknowledged the significance of innate, individual differences in shaping adult character (1944: 3-4).

The Culture and Personality school’s interest in child development evolved into a number of cross-cultural studies of child-rearing, most notably the ‘Six cultures’ study. This ambitious project utilised a common methodology to compare ‘different patterns of child rearing and subsequent differences in personality’ (Whiting 1963: 1) in six field sites in Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, India, and the US. Its ethnographic results were rich, with systematic attention to children’s treatment and routines, but with little attempt to make a general argument, given the significant differences between the cultures under study. Robert LeVine, an original member of the Six cultures team, continued its tradition of in-depth, observational research, examining childcare among the Gusii of Kenya from the 1950s to the 1970s. He argued that Gusii practices which diverged from those considered optimal in the US – such as not asking questions of young children, or not allowing them to initiate conversation with their elders – made sense within a local model of childhood and care (LeVine et al. 1994).

Early British anthropology was less concerned than American anthropology with psychological development, and more interested in socialization as the broad process through which immature beings became mature, competent members of a society. A generation of anthropologists trained by Bronislaw Malinowski included descriptions of children’s lives as a standard element of their ethnographic monographs. In We, the Tikopia, Raymond Firth discusses children’s care by and relationships with family members, the ‘independent little bands’ of children that work and play together, and children’s role in helping households run smoothly’, given their obedience to adult instruction (1936: 145-150). In Chisungu, Audrey Richards (1956) analysed a series of ritual acts and physical challenges for Bemba girls, one of a number of studies of initiation rituals and their role in the socialization of children. This work showed how the ‘end’ of childhood, and the attainment of adulthood, was not necessarily a natural event, but had to be achieved through ritual means. Studies of children’s position and role within the family also drew attention to the impacts of birth order (Firth 1956, Fortes 1974) and fostering arrangements (Goody & Goody 1967) on children’s treatment.

In linguistic anthropology, a number of anthropologists have focused on ‘language socialization’, the ways in which children are socialised to use language in different societies, and the ways that this shapes children’s development. Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin (1984) outline and compare three different ‘developmental stories’ with respect to infants’ language socialization. The first of these, the ‘Anglo-American white middle-class developmental story’ (the ‘story’ taken as standard in much psychological literature), involves an approach to infants as fully communicative partners. This cultural context encourages face-to-face interactions and mutual gazing between infants and caregivers, simplification of speech by adults (‘baby talk’), and the rich interpretation of infant vocalizations. By contrast, the second such ‘story’, found amongst the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, emphasises the ‘softness’ and lack of understanding of infants. Here, infant utterances are not interpreted, and babies are not spoken to in ‘baby talk’.^[6]Instead, Kaluli caregivers turn their babies outward towards the social group, and speak ‘for’ their infant, often in a high-pitched, nasalized voice. Finally, according to the ‘Samoan developmental story’, young infants are also not conversational partners; neither babbling nor baby-talk are encouraged, and children must instead be socialised to show ‘respect’ by always considering the perspective of higher-ranking persons. Based on these stories (and their attendant constructions of early childhood), Schieffelin and Ochs argue that societies can be divided into two main types: those (such as white Anglo-American society) that adapt situations to the child, and societies (such as Kaluli and Samoa) that try to adapt the child to situations.

Amongst the Beng of rural Côte D’Ivoire, infants are thought to be reincarnated ancestors emerging from an ‘afterlife’ called wrugbe (Gottlieb 2004). This spiritual journey is a long and difficult one, and therefore infants and young children are thought to have a fragile hold on life. Gottlieb considers Beng infants’ social lives to be strikingly active when compared with babies in her native US. Though her research moves beyond earlier concerns with culturally-specific personality development, Gottlieb nevertheless sees the Beng emphasis on infant sociability as shaping children’s emotional responses in distinctive ways. In particular, and as a result of extensive alloparenting (care by those other than parents), Beng babies do not have exclusive or intensive attachments to their mother, something that might be seen as part of ‘healthy’ development in Western settings. Similarly, in Inuit morality play (1998), an ethnography of a three-year-old girl, Jean Briggs approaches young children’s actions and experiences as part of a complex social world shared with various adults. Briggs argues that Inuit adults encourage children to think deeply about moral issues by presenting them with emotionally powerful problems in an exaggerated and personally relevant style. This takes several forms, most notably the asking (by neighbours and kin) of dangerous questions – ‘Will you come and live with me?’ ‘Shall I be your new mother?’ ‘Shall I kill your father?’ – often in a sustained ‘interrogation’. Through these complex, playful dramas, Inuit adults test children, experiment with their developing emotions, and help them learn to control their behaviour in specific ways.

Knowledge and learning

Anthropological research with children has always been interested in ‘education’ in its broadest sense. Childhood, from this perspective, is interesting because it is the crucial period during which cultural knowledge is re-constituted, and possibly negotiated, by children. Although adults sometimes explicitly instruct children in particular ideas or practices, much of this learning takes place in an unconscious, embodied way. Raymond Firth saw ‘education’ in Tikopia as practical and non-disciplinary, ‘hinging upon the participation of the child in all ordinary activities from early years’ (1936: 147). Similarly, in Social and psychological aspects of education in Taleland (1938), Meyer Fortes emphasised how Tallensi children, unlike many British children of his time, did not exist in a differentiated ‘children’s sphere’. Rather, they shared the same activities and knowledge as adults, allowing them full participation in economic, ritual, and religious life. Fortes’s text gives a rich account of children’s everyday education as they take part in agricultural tasks, look after livestock, join ceremonies and dances, and joke with grandparents. He argued that children in this rural society rarely asked ‘why’ questions, since so much of their learning took place in real situations where they directly observed and practised skills.

Earlier work within the socialization frame tended to focus on childrearing by adults as a way in which (relatively passive) children were moulded. By contrast, more explicitly ‘child-focused’ ethnographies approach children not simply as adults-in-the-making but as social agents in the present. Such work gives more space to what children say and know, and the ways in which this might be different to what they are told by adults. In The private worlds of dying children (1978), Myra Bluebond-Langner describes how, as their illness progresses, leukemic children come to learn about the world of the hospital in which they are treated, about their parents’ desires, and about their own grim prognoses. Bluebond-Langner argues that American childhood is commonly understood as ‘a period of formation, of becoming’ in which children are ‘molded for their futures’ (1978: 210). This concept explains the reluctance of both medical personnel and children’s parents to talk explicitly to the children about their condition and treatment. Although these children still manage, through close observation, to gather accurate information about disease and death, they must practise what Bluebond-Langner calls ‘the rules of mutual pretense’ in order not to disrupt the ‘illusion of their normalcy’ (1978: 213). In pretending not to know that they are dying, the children demonstrate their social competence, upholding the future-oriented concept of childhood, and protecting both their parents and their doctors.

Other studies have also explored this disjunction between (limited) adult instruction and (extensive) child knowledge. Peggy Froerer (2011) argues that, in a tribal village in rural Chhattisgarh, central India, children are never systematically taught moral lessons in right and wrong. Nevertheless, as peripheral participants at adult-centred rituals, children pick up moral understandings, which they then utilise in response to illness. In the village, illnesses may be considered ‘simple’ and morally neutral, or may be considered to be ‘supernatural’ punishments for moral infractions. Adults state very explicitly that they do not consider children capable of causing “supernatural” illness, whether in themselves or others, since prior to marriage they are not thought to have acquired full knowledge (Froerer 2011: 376). However, children have a different understanding of their knowledge and capabilities and consider themselves to be responsible for illnesses caused by ritual or other misdeeds. This example shows how children do not simply reproduce or replicate the ideas of adult social actors (who are often dismissive of children’s explanations), but have their own perspective on moral responsibility, actively applying adult understandings to their own behaviours. More broadly, some anthropologists argue that it is only by studying how children come to make sense of particular concepts, such as hierarchy or ethnicity, that adult knowledge can be properly understood (Toren 1993, Astuti 2001).

Children’s abilities to only partially accept the messages of adults regarding child competencies are also demonstrated in work on language use. On the Caribbean island of Dominica, a complex, multilingual situation exists, where English (the official language of government and school) appears to be squeezing out the local Afro-French creole, Patwa (Paugh 2012). Adults, who want their children to master English, forbid them to speak Patwa, even as adults use Patwa in their own interactions, or even sometimes to instruct children. Nevertheless, ethnographic attention to micro-level, playful interactions between siblings and peers in ‘child-controlled settings’, shows how Patwa remains an important language for children. Whilst it may be forbidden to them, the fact that children hear Patwa used by adults in ‘affect-laden socializing activities’ means that children use the language in specific ways amongst themselves, most notably to ‘intensify their speech and control others’ (Paugh 2012: 19). This work is informed by the tradition of language socialization described above, but shows the significance of children’s talk within a multi-lingual context where language use carries complex socio-political messages.

Formal schooling and new models of childhood

The spread of formal schooling around the world has brought with it new models of the place and work of childhood. Significantly, one consequence of the spread of formal schooling noted in much anthropological work is a disconnect between the knowledge and skills valued in school, and locally-valued, culturally-specific skills and knowledge. For example, the introduction of formal schooling amongst the Huaorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon has led to a striking contrast between the spaces of schooling and the social environments in which children are raised (Rival 1996). Attending school gives these children few transferable skills, whilst spending time away from the forest and longhouse deskills them in the knowledge essential to Huaorani cultural and economic life. This gap, or disconnect, between school and children’s home environments was central to Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s (1977) study of French schooling and inequality. They see the French educational system as reproducing wider social hierarchies by valuing the cultural capital (forms of speech, manners, and ways of behaving learnt unconsciously in a home environment) of children from upper-middle-class backgrounds and devaluing the cultural capital of lower-class children. Schools, they argue, make middle-class children’s cultural capital (a product of their class upbringing) appear ‘natural’, thus legitimising the reproduction of class privilege. This imposes a kind of symbolic violence (non-physical repression) on non-elite children, who develop a sense of their ‘social limits’ and begin to self-censor in the company of the elite. In ethnographies of schooling, such unofficial values and judgements are often referred to as the ‘hidden curriculum’.

Bourdieu and Passeron’s theory of the connections between schooling and social inequality has come to be known as ‘reproduction theory’, since they focus on the role of formal schooling in reproducing wider structures of inequality. However, this work often fails to consider the perspectives of the very children being marginalised in school. By contrast, Paul Willis (1977) gives more space to the ways in which working-class youth creatively struggle against the inequities of the schooling system. Learning to labour is an ethnographic study of a school in an industrial, urban setting in the English Midlands. The primary focus is ‘the lads’, a group of twelve boys who Willis describes as members of an ‘oppositional culture’ in the school. In contrast to Passeron and Bourdieu, Willis shows how the lads were not simply socialised by the institution to self-censor or to accept their subordinate position. Instead, he describes how they constantly disrupted school routines, fidgeting and tutting in class, following a ‘foot-dragging walk’ down corridors, and frequently erupting into ‘derisive or insane laughter’ at the expense of the school’s conformist pupils (1977: 13). These boys talk back to the middle-class ideologies of school, and celebrate their own working-class masculinity. Ironically, though, in choosing ‘having a laff’ (1997: 29) over conformity to the educational process, ‘the lads’ ultimately seal their own fate, leaving school without qualifications and reproducing their class position.

If this, and later, research (see especially Evans 2006) emphasises the role of class structures in shaping children’s experiences of formal schooling, other works have analysed the significance of racial and gendered aspects of identity to exclusion (see Canessa 2004). They explore, for example, how the ‘hidden curriculum’ of a Californian elementary school marginalises and isolates African-American boys, denigrating their style and body language, judging their familial forms of English as inferior, and ultimately constructing them as ‘bad boys’ (Ferguson 2000). Another ethnography of a Californian school analyses the construction and policing of high school masculinity through the ‘fag discourse’ used to attack students who (either temporarily or permanently) appear to be homosexual (Pascoe 2007). Significantly, upholding (heterosexual) masculinity is important not only to teenage students but also to the school itself, as an institution invested in rituals (school rallies, prom, yearbook photos, popularity contests) that affirm heteronormative gender roles.

In addition to highlighting the ‘hidden curriculum’ of the implicit or unintended lessons, values, and perspectives transmitted in schools, critical anthropological work on formal schooling has also explored its other impacts. One key issue is the extent to which school systems have ‘stolen’ childhood from children, turning their lives into a stressful, endless ordeal. Thus South Korean children have been described as facing an ‘examination war’, with nearly every minute of their lives organised around school or the extra classes (up to five hours a day) deemed necessary to ensure their ‘success’ (Cho 1995). Students are ‘trapped in a system that calls for intense inhuman competition and rote learning’ (1995: 154), with resultant impacts on mental and physical health. Similarly, Norma Field (1995) paints a portrait of Japanese education as ‘endless labor’, with the ordinary school day followed by ‘cram school’ in the evening. Whereas Ariès drew attention to the lack of a set-apart concept of childhood in early European history, Field highlights the ‘disappearance of childhood’ taking place in ‘an orderly, prosperous society’ (1995: 60). A further, somewhat different, critique is that formal schooling has created aspirations and expectations that, for many children, in developing contexts, are impossible to fulfil. In response, some governments have tried to create more practical school curricula for children. For example, in the late 1990s, the Ugandan government introduced a more ‘rural’ or ‘vocational’ curriculum that promoted local farming and aimed to equip children with the relevant skills for agricultural livelihoods (Meinert 1995). However, this was not well received by rural children themselves, who had hoped that going to school would enable them to pursue an urban social status. In the words of one sixteen-year-old, ‘Life in town is sweeter…. If you get stranded here in the village, you will work very hard, but life is just bitter’ (Meinert 1995: 183).

Anthropology, then, has often taken a critical perspective on formal schooling, questioning its separation from local knowledge, showing how it reproduces existing social hierarchies, and drawing attention to its frequently negative impacts on childhood experience. However, the picture drawn is not entirely negative. In rural Taiwan, and despite the disconnections between school and everyday family life, the importance of schooling is emphasised in part because schoolteachers are held up by parents as models for children to emulate (Stafford 1995). Similarly, Ethiopian schoolchildren see their teachers as inspiring figures and are strongly motivated to please them (Marshall 2016). This example is interesting for showing how the promise of better jobs and higher status in the future are not the only reasons why children might wish to attend school. In this Ethiopian case, children are motivated by the desire to be loved, valued for their hard work, and ‘respected’.

Problematising child rights

Today, the work of many international development agencies and child-focused NGOs is informed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The CRC puts forward a particular model of childhood as a time deserving of ‘special care and assistance’. Much contemporary, critical anthropological work on childhood has been concerned with exploring the implications of this universal construction of children’s individual rights, particularly in developing contexts.

Two key principles of the CRC are that, firstly, the ‘best interests’ of children should be the primary consideration in all actions concerning them (Article 3) and, secondly, a child’s views should be sought in matters affecting the child (Article 12). However, these principles are not straightforward. For example, in NGO programmes for orphans in Uganda, it is usually adults who make decisions about children’s ‘best interests’; child orphans themselves are rarely meaningfully consulted (Cheney 2017: 52-3). In Thailand, child prostitutes have become figures of concern to the international community and yet, as Heather Montgomery explores (2001a), children’s own voices and perspectives on this difficult issue are rarely heard. Montgomery conducted fieldwork in a squatter community where child prostitution had become central to maintaining precarious household incomes. Contrary to the stereotypes of activists, children in this community do not necessarily see themselves as passive victims, but emphasise that they are working to uphold a moral obligation to their parents. For Montgomery, the problem with the CRC is that it does not give clear guidance on how to prioritise or balance achieving different child rights. In order to uphold children’s ‘best interests’, she asks, whose voices should be prioritised? And how can we balance children’s right to be free of sexual exploitation with their right to family life, or to have their voices listened to? (2001b: 95)

The contradictions of child-rights-framed aid programmes have also been investigated in Vietnam (Burr 2006). One NGO-supported project in Hanoi aimed to remove children from the streets and help them return to countryside homes. However, although the program was apparently informed by the CRC, it put adult wishes before those of children, and was entirely ineffective. No provision was made to help rural families cope with the extra costs of supporting a dependent person, and so a significant percentage of the relocated children soon returned to their life in the city. The study outlines a clash between children’s own desires to work and the beliefs of (privileged) NGO workers that they should not. As many ethnographers have shown (Aptekar 1991, Glauser 1997, Hecht 1998), adult perceptions of such children as ‘out of place’ on the street are often behind misguided attempts to ‘help’ them.

Debates around ‘child labour’ (work that exploits or harms children) are also highlighted by Melanie Jacquemin (2006), who describes a child-rights-framed NGO project supporting ‘Young Female Domestics’ in the city of Abidjan, Côte D’Ivoire. This project concerned paid domestic work carried out by girls under the age of fifteen. However, by focusing only on a minority of girls known as ‘little waged maids’, the project neglected a larger category of child workers known locally as ‘little nieces’. These girls are considered foster children and often work long hours in the homes of extended family members for no pay. Indeed, Jacquemin argues that the distinction between being a family member and an employee is kept ‘purposefully blurred’ in these situations in order to ‘obscure but maximize exploitation’ (2004: 485). By focusing only on ‘child labour’ as a problem for paid workers, the project in Abidjan inadvertently contributed to local understandings (shared by the girls themselves) that what ‘little nieces’ do is not work.

Not only does Jacquemin’s research demonstrate the potentially negative impacts of heavy-handed rights-based attempts to ‘abolish’ child labour, it also chimes with other research on the gendered complexities of children’s work. In Children’s lifeworlds (1994), Olga Nieuwenhuys makes a case for taking children’s perspectives on their work seriously. Although adults in a Keralan village did not see girls’ domestic tasks as ‘work’, Nieuwenhuys discovers that the girls themselves did. She argues that discourses on child labour make light of the huge differences between the work of male and female children, where the work of the latter is productively essential but ideologically undervalued. More widely, Nieuwenhuys has problematised what she describes as the ‘dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work’ (1996: 237), arguing that rights-based attempts to ban ‘child labour’ have the paradoxical impact of reinforcing children’s vulnerability to exploitation.

Despite attempts to globalise ‘child rights’, cultural context is key to understanding children’s particular vulnerability or resilience. Susan Shepler (2014) focuses on the demobilization (releasing from various armed forces) of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, following the 2002 end of the country’s decade-long civil war. Shepler argues that Sierra Leoneans have their own ‘culturally specific reactions to child soldiering’ that are not reflected in global child rights discourse (2014: 16). What is most disturbing to them is not the so-called ‘lost innocence’ of child soldiers, but the disruption of village-based intergenerational relations. Shepler pays detailed attention to youth who bypassed the rights-based programmes designed to help them, and instead ‘spontaneously’ reintegrated. Ironically, although such youth do not have access to the benefits that NGOs provide, they are better able to blend back into their communities than children who are ‘formally’ reintegrated, whose ‘child soldier’ identity is often unintentionally hardened.^[7]

The politics of childhood

Debates around children’s rights and the imposition of particular expectations of children’s needs make clear that childhood is often a politically contested concept. Liisa Malkki analyses the profoundly depoliticised ways in which children’s images are utilised in ‘transnational representational spheres’ (2010: 58). For example, the figure of the child often serves to represent a ‘basic human goodness and innocence’ (2010: 60; see also Fassin 2013). However, the problem with this representation, and others, is that when children do not fit into these images, they are viewed as a ‘category mistake’. That is, they are not seen as ‘real’ children. This aspect of Malkki’s analysis helps explain a number of examples where young people’s status as children is not recognised. For example, in Zimbabwe, Brazil, and Haiti, street children have been criminalised and dehumanised as dangerous ‘others’, leaving them vulnerable to round-ups, and violent attacks, by the police (Bourdillon 1994, Scheper-Hughes & Hoffman 1998, Kovats-Bernat 2006). In the UK, immigration officials may disqualify those seeking political asylum from the category of ‘children’ because ‘real’ children are assumed to be apolitical (Crawley 2009: 99). In Sabah, East Malaysia, the Malaysian-born children of migrant workers are seen by the wider society as ‘impossible children’ since they have been born to people who are meant to be temporary, and whose families are meant to reside elsewhere (Allerton 2018).

Since the publication of Mead’s Coming of age in Samoa, several anthropologists have utilised the ‘coming of age’ genre to explore how children negotiate new expectations and experiences in rapidly changing social conditions (Markowitz 2000, Fong 2004). This work demonstrates the micro-political and emotional impact on children of inter-generational change. For example, in traditional Canadian Inuit society, ‘adolescence’, as it is commonly understood, did not exist. Instead, through constant intergenerational contact, children reached social and economic maturity at a relatively young age (Condon 1990). As the previously nomadic Inuit have become concentrated in settlements, and with the introduction of formal schooling and television, adolescence has gradually emerged as a new category of childhood experience. In the settlement, older children are less reliant on their families, and able to spend more time with groups of peers. However, the pressures of new social and economic expectations, combined with the loss of cultural and linguistic traditions, have led to an increase in drinking, violence, and youth suicide (Condon 1990: 276; see also Stevenson 2009).

Ethnographies of transnational migration and kinship have also described the impact on children’s lives of social and economic change. In Children of global migration (2005), Rhacel Salazar Parreñas examines the lives of children ‘left behind’ in the Philippines by migrant parents. Amongst children of migrant mothers, a discourse of ‘abandonment’ was particularly prominent, and children expressed emotions of longing, grief, and anger about their situation. Parreñas argues that the ‘gender paradox of globalization’, in which women are pushed to work outside the home even whilst they are still held to the ideal standard of a nurturing and physically intimate mother, has mostly negative psychological consequences for children. By contrast, in her study of Ghanaian transnational families, Cati Coe (2014) describes how the West African region has a long history of ‘fostering’ in which children ‘circulate’ between different households. Here, migration is an ever-present possibility in children’s lives. Nevertheless, even in this context, there is still a marked contrast between the views of adults and children. Whilst parents tend to be relatively upbeat in their representations of migration, children’s emotional responses to their living arrangements in Ghana reveal feelings of a lack of control over their situation.

However, despite the often-negative impacts on children of social change, and of new expectations of childhood, care, and kinship, children often respond positively to social transformations. In a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, children are compelled to engage with different projects of (Palestinian and Jordanian) nationalism, as well as the transnational Islamist movement (Hart 2002). However, they do so creatively, reshaping and resisting different influences and sentiments where possible. For example, one 12-year-old girl, Muna, identifies strongly as ‘Palestinian’, and is concerned about religion, but also supports a Jordanian football club and enjoys aspects of Western TV and pop music. Muna’s response to multiple cultural and religious influences is illustrative of children’s ability to imagine themselves as belonging to more than one community, and to respond in dynamic ways to political discourses.

Conclusion

Anthropological research has shown how childhood varies across space and time, how it involves different expectations of young people of different ages, how it intersects with other variables such as social class, and how it shapes children’s everyday experiences. Although many earlier anthropological studies were interested in childhood for what it revealed about the cultural formation of personality, or the socialization of young people into social roles, later work has moved away from a narrow focus on children as simply adults-in-the-making. Ethnographies that take children’s own knowledge seriously have explored children’s own cultural perspectives, and their ability to creatively respond to linguistic, social, and economic change. Even as arguments are made about the ‘disappearance’ of childhood in contexts of contemporary formal schooling, economic exploitation, or armed conflict, children often demonstrate considerable resilience.

One powerful finding of child-focused ethnography, as seen in Bluebond-Langner’s research with terminally ill children, is that children are often very aware of the realities from which adults may try to shield them. This is why understanding concepts of childhood is a central task in appreciating the realities of children’s lives. As Donna Lanclos notes in her study of play in Belfast, children ‘do not passively accept the definitions of “child” that are imposed from without’ (2003: 48). In their language use, their jokes, or their interpretation of illness, they may subtly resist adult perspectives on childhood. This resistance is nicely illustrated by Danish toddlers who are bussed out of the city to attend ‘nature kindergartens’ (Gulløv 2003). Whilst their parents see these natural spaces as the proper place of childhood, some of the children complain about the cold and lack of toys. Anthropological research shows how, even when we think we are acting in children’s best interests, we may be imposing our own understandings of childhood on them.

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Note on contributor

Catherine Allerton teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. She is a specialist in island Southeast Asia, with research interests in children and childhoods, migration, kinship, place, and landscape. She has conducted fieldwork in rural Flores, Eastern Indonesia, and in Kota Kinabalu, the capital city of Sabah, East Malaysia.

Dr Catherine Allerton, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. c.l.allerton@lse.ac.uk

[1] This article draws in part on material published in ‘Guide to further reading’ (2016) in Children: ethnographic encounters (ed.) C. Allerton, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

[2] For a critical feminist approach to mainstream theories of child development that draws particular attention to their impact on everyday family lives, see Burman (1994).

[3] For example, Nicholas Orme, in Medieval children (2001), refutes the idea of the nonexistence of ‘childhood’ as a distinct phase of life in the Middle Ages, drawing on evidence of parents who grieved intensely for sick or dead children.

[4] The central text in outlining this paradigm is Constructing and reconstructing childhood (1990) by Allison James and Alan Prout, which emphasises the importance of studying children’s social relationships and knowledge in and of themselves.

[5] Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1993) has also shown the impact of state neglect and poverty on the ability of Brazilian mothers to care for their infants.

[6] This strongly contradicts the arguments of those, such as Colwyn Trevarthen (1988), who argue that the use of simplified ‘baby talk’ is a universal, innate response to infants.

[7] Research with ‘child soldiers’ has also questioned the application of the (adult) psychiatric condition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a way to understand their responses and wellbeing (Boyden & de Berry 2004: xiii).

Professionals

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

Elizabeth Hull

SOAS University of London

Initially published 21 Apr 2020

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professionals as agents of social control

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

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

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

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

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

Performance and aesthetics of professionalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Status, aspiration and class mobility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professional ethics and care

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Moore, H.L. & M. Vaughan 1994. Cutting down trees: gender, nutrition, and agricultural change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990. London: James Currey.

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

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

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

Richards, A.I. 1995. Land, labour and diet in Northern Rhodesia: an economic study of the Bemba tribe. Münster: LIT Verlag.

Riles, A. 2006. Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Saxenian, A. 2002. Silicon Valley’s new immigrant high-growth entrepreneurs. Economic Development Quarterly 16, 20-31.

Spronk, R. 2012. Ambiguous pleasures: sexuality and middle class self-perceptions in Nairobi. New York: Berghahn Books.

White, P., A. Hillman & J. Latimer 2012. Ordering, enrolling, and dismissing: moments of access across hospital spaces. Space and Culture 15, 68-87.

Woods, N. 2007. The globalizers: the IMF, the World Bank, and their borrowers. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Zaloom, C. 2006. Out of the pits: traders and technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University Press.

Note on contributor

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

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

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

Charité

Felix Stein — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 18:35:27 +0000

Jonathan Benthall

University College London

Initially published 17 Aug 2018

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

Abstract:

Cet article aborde la charité comme un terme «étique» qui facilite la comparaison entre des traditions différentes. Les bases théoriques en ont été posées par deux grands anthropologues au début du XXe siècle: Marcel Mauss, dont L’essai sur le don a suscité des interprétations très variées sur le thème de l’échange et de la réciprocité; et Edvard Westermarck, chez lequel, derrière les préjugés sur une hiérarchie des «races», on peut discerner quelques idées durables au sujet de la relation entre charité et religion. Le simple avis selon lequel tout don charitable est simplement une avance sur des bénéfices à percevoir ultérieurement (dans ce monde ou dans l’au-delà) doit être nuancé par le fait que la «mutualité» est un aspect de la coexistence humaine complémentaire à la réciprocité.

Vers la fin du XXe siècle, certains anthropologues ont jeté un regard critique sur les agences d’aide occidentales. Mais la réflexion sur la charité a été en grande partie laissée aux historiens. Une fois l’intérêt anthropologique pour la charité retombé, ce sont d’abord les religions dharmiques du sous-continent indien, puis l’Islam qui l’ont ravivé et ont stimulé le processus de «déprovincialisation» de l’opinion courante selon laquelle la charité est un monopole de la tradition euro-américaine. Si les anthropologues sociaux ont étudié de nombreuses autres manifestations de la charité, nous prêterons ici une attention particulière aux prescriptions coraniques relatives aux bonnes œuvres et aux différentes manières par lesquelles elles ont renforcé la formation d’organisations caritatives islamiques, dont l’efficacité pratique et potentielle a été compromise par une réaction vraisemblablement excessive aux attaques du 11 septembre 2001 contre les États-Unis.

Les anthropologues ont contribué à la critique de l’humanitarisme en tant qu’idéologie et nous donnons ici des exemples de projets de recherche de terrain productifs qui en ont tiré parti. Enfin, une synthèse d’aide méthodologique holistique pourra être utile afin de structurer l’étude de la charité et il est rappelé que la nature problématique de la charité que les anthropologues tentent de résoudre aujourd’hui a été soulevée par l’auteur de la Bhagavad Gita, plusieurs siècles avant notre ère.

Introduction

Le terme «charité»^[1] désigne l’aumône et l’offrande volontaire, mais il possède aussi des connotations d’amour spirituel, la première vertu chrétienne. Il a été utilisé dans certaines versions de la Bible pour traduire, via le latin caritas, le terme grec du Nouveau Testament, agapè. Certains défenseurs du Christianisme, par exemple dans la Catholic Encyclopedia, confondent les deux sens de ce terme. Dans l’Angleterre élisabéthaine, «charité» acquiert aussi une définition juridique restrictive qui reste essentielle dans le droit britannique et américain. Une distinction est souvent opérée dans les langues européennes entre «charité» et «philanthropie». Pour les Grecs de l’Antiquité, la «philanthropie» était «l’amour du principe d’humanité». Mais elle s’est confondue, pendant le siècle des Lumières, avec l’idée de bienfait public dépouillé de connotation religieuse et, aujourd’hui, elle est particulièrement associée à la générosité des riches et au patronage de la culture savante (et, plus récemment, à la promesse de financement du développement d’une grande partie des pays du Sud).

Jusqu’à présent, toutes les tentatives d’étude comparative de notre sujet se sont dispensées de cette distinction entre charité et philanthropie, notamment du fait qu’il n’existe pas de parallèle dans les langues majeures non européennes, comme l’arabe ou le hindi. Un autre terme largement utilisé, «l’action humanitaire» pose problème, parce que le mot «humanitaire» peut être couramment interprété comme englobant toutes formes d’action philanthropique ou altruiste; mais l’humanitarisme en tant que mouvement peut être défini comme une idéologie qui remonte au XIXe siècle (Davies 2012). (Plus précisément, le droit humanitaire international est l’ensemble des mesures visant à limiter les effets d’un conflit armé, et n’entre pas dans le cadre de cet article.) Si nous recherchons un point de comparaison, c’est-à-dire un terme «étique», par opposition aux catégories dépendant d’un ancrage culturel (ou «émiques»), alors le terme de «bonnes œuvres» est tout à fait convenable; mais dans cet article, le terme de «charité» sera utilisé au sens inclusif.

Fondements théoriques

Deux géants de l’anthropologie ont posé les bases, au début du XXe siècle, de notre compréhension théorique de la charité. Le premier est Marcel Mauss, dans son essai sur la réciprocité et la solidarité sociale, Essai sur le don (2016 [1925]^[2]). L’argument de Mauss selon lequel le principe d’échange touche tous les aspects de la vie sociale, dans une «atmosphère du don, de l’obligation et de la liberté mêlées» (2016: 177), a stimulé un débat productif mais parfois confus (Testart 1998; Guyer 2016). L’autre pionnier, peut-être moins largement reconnu en la matière, était Edvard Westermarck. Il adhérait aux idées victoriennes sur l’existence d’une hiérarchie entre les «races» civilisées et sauvages, mais sa comparaison globale des traditions de charité (1909), toujours impressionnante à ce jour, explique comment l’aide mutuelle est couramment influencée par des motifs égoïstes et, de façon plus surprenante, comment la charité dans toutes les «religions supérieures» est associée au sacrifice.

On peut se demander pourquoi l’anthropologie socio-culturelle n’a pas tiré parti des points de vue de Mauss et de Westermarck sur la charité avant le dernier quart du siècle. L’explication vient peut-être du fait que la plupart des anthropologues se sont positionnés politiquement sur un spectre situé entre un réformisme social qui dénigrait la charité comme une solution tentant de soigner les symptômes plutôt que le mal, légitimant les privilèges des riches, et un marxisme rigoureux, fermement opposé à la charité, frein à l’inévitable révolution prolétarienne. Mais la conséquence du rejet de la charité privée est le placement de tout le pouvoir entre les mains de l’État. L’hostilité pure et simple envers la charité, complément aux droits acquis par le paiement de l’impôt, est beaucoup moins fréquemment exprimée par les sociologues aujourd’hui, notamment du fait de la prévalence des accords de partenariat entre les organisations caritatives et les gouvernements. De plus, le rôle de la charité privée pour compenser le recul de l’État-providence, avec les conséquences particulièrement désastreuses que cela entraîne dans les anciens pays communistes comme la Russie (Caldwell, 2016), est un thème fréquent dans les travaux de recherche récents.

Le commentaire de Jonathan Parry sur l’Essai sur le don de Mauss (1986) a provoqué trente ans de débat académique sur ce texte. L’argument quelque peu provocateur de Parry consistait à présenter le don pur ou gratuit, associé aux religions de salut (renoncement volontaire à des ressources sans rien attendre en retour) comme une sorte de complément dialectique à la marchandisation des biens qui domine les sociétés industrielles occidentales. Peu après, Mary Douglas (1990), sans faire aucune référence à Parry dans son introduction à une traduction en anglais de l’Essai sur le don, dénigrait la notion même de don gratuit. Pour ce qui nous concerne aujourd’hui, nous pouvons extraire deux suggestions liées de l’essai de Mauss.

D’abord, lorsqu’un don ne peut pas être réciproque, le donateur bénéficie d’un crédit moral, mais le bénéficiaire s’en trouve offensé. D’où la réputation de «froideur» souvent attribuée à la charité organisée en Europe depuis le XIXe siècle, notamment lorsqu’elle évite les relations en face-à-face entre donateurs et bénéficiaires. Les réformateurs sociaux ont cherché à la remplacer par l’État-providence. L’ethnographie indienne révèle une interprétation du don charitable particulièrement sinistre: les dons non réciproques faits aux prêtres et aux renonçants peuvent porter malheur et transmettre ce mauvais sort du donateur au bénéficiaire si de soigneuses précautions ne sont pas prises.

Ensuite, un «don gratuit» ne peut admettre aucune dimension de réciprocité. Lorsque je fais un don, je dois le faire de façon à ce que personne (moi y compris) n’y voie aucun aspect transactionnel ou ne s’attende à ce que j’en sois récompensé, dans ce monde ou dans «l’économie céleste» de l’au-delà. Bien que ce paradoxe soit marquant dans les trois religions abrahamiques, c’est en Inde qu’il est le plus élaboré. La Bhagavad Gita (17.20-22, voir aussi Bornstein 2009: 624-5, 644) distingue la «charité en signe de bonté» (le don sans rien attendre en retour), la «charité en signe de passion» (avec intention de récompense, ou le don à contrecœur) et la «charité en signe de noirceur» (un don effectué au mauvais moment ou au mauvais endroit, à un bénéficiaire indigne ou avec mépris). James Laidlaw décrit comment, dans la secte Shvetambar («vêtus de blanc») du jaïnisme indien, lorsque les renonçants célibataires itinérants font l’aumône de nourriture auprès des familles laïques, ils affichent une «indifférence revêche» plutôt que leur gratitude ou leur appréciation, le but étant de ne pas créer de relation sociale et d’atteindre une perfection spirituelle éternelle (Laidlaw 2000: 632). D’après Hilal Alkan-Zeybek (2012), le bénévolat islamique des femmes des classes moyennes et supérieures auprès des pauvres dans une ville d’Anatolie centrale, poursuit un objectif exactement contraire: renforcer la solidarité par le contact physique et la «transformation éthique» du donateur, afin que les hiérarchies de classe soient atténuées. La monographie d’Erica Bornstein basée sur son travail de terrain à Delhi montre en quoi les croyances et pratiques regroupées dans un «hindouisme» moderne interagissent avec les traditions séculières, bouddhistes, islamiques et chrétiennes, pour former un paysage caritatif diversifié, à la fois au plan international et en Inde (Bornstein 2012).

Les interprétations de Mauss sont compliquées par le fait qu’il considérait tous les dons comme impliquant métaphoriquement un sacrifice: lorsque je fais un don, je donne une part de moi-même. Westermarck soulignait pour sa part que, dans les enseignements chrétien et juif, l’aumône venait remplacer les offrandes sacrificielles à Dieu. La charité en général est habituellement saluée comme une expression d’empathie ou, à l’inverse, dénigrée comme apaisant la conscience des donateurs et maintenant le statu quo. Mais Westermarck suggère une troisième voie dans la façon de la concevoir: il l’envisage comme un acte de dévotion. Les prières adressées par les bénéficiaires sont, dans les traditions abrahamiques, une manière d’offrir en retour (le revers étant les malédictions murmurées par ceux qui sont injustement traités). Ilana Silber affirme que de subtils «échos» des idéologies et pratiques sacrificielles perdurent au fil du temps, comme le commandement chrétien selon lequel le don charitable est un moyen pour les fidèles d’imiter le don de Dieu que constitue le sacrifice de Jésus (Silber 2000: 305, 310). Elle affirme que trois types de don religieux doivent être distingués dans l’Ancien Testament: les dons à Dieu, ceux aux représentants religieux et ceux aux nécessiteux. La doctrine chrétienne de la diakonia, ou service, insiste toutefois sur le fait que tout acte au profit des affamés, des assoiffés, des sans-abri, des démunis, des malades ou des prisonniers équivaut à rendre le même service à Dieu (Mathieu 25: 31-46). Amira Mittermaier, dans un article sur le bénévolat islamique en Égypte (2014) suivant Fassin (2012), associe étroitement la tradition chrétienne et post-chrétienne de la charité avec la compassion, contrairement à l’obéissance religieuse qu’elle avait observée dans la pratique de certains de ses interlocuteurs musulmans du Caire. Mais l’histoire des institutions caritatives, parmi les nombreuses institutions et dénominations chrétiennes, est si variée qu’il existe un risque de généralisation abusive au sujet de leurs motivations, qui incluent la renonciation, l’abnégation et l’expiation, ainsi que la compassion.

Dans la droite ligne d’une tendance générale des sciences sociales à reconnaître la porosité de la distinction entre le religieux et le «séculier», un caractère «quasi-religieux» peut être attribué à certaines des agences humanitaires et de développement séculières les plus performantes (Barnett et Stein 2012), dans la mesure où elles sont guidées par des principes moraux fortement internalisés, un respect pour leurs fondateurs charismatiques et un engagement pour le monde dans son ensemble. Philip Fountain, motivé par son étude ethnographique auprès du Mennonite Central Committee, une agence de développement chrétienne d’Amérique du Nord, s’est intéressé à ce problème conceptuel, en partant de la réflexion selon laquelle tout développement, qu’il soit marqué comme religieux ou non, est peut-être inévitablement prosélyte en ce qu’il cherche à modifier les pratiques sociales d’autrui (Fountain 2015).

Réciprocité et mutualité

Des études ethnographiques suggèrent que l’analyse de la charité limitée aux équations de l’offre et de la récompense est peut-être trop monodimensionnelle. Elles nous renvoient aux débats anthropologiques non résolus sur la relation entre réciprocité et mutualité et sur la nature de l’altruisme.

Mittermaier, dans un autre article (2013), en se basant sur son travail de terrain en Égypte en 2011-2012, met une économie de la grâce (baraka), qui insiste sur la générosité, en contraste avec une économie de la récompense (thawab) qui vise à s’assurer une place au paradis: ce dernier modèle, selon elle, a été accentué par la marche du capitalisme dans les sociétés arabes. Emanuel Schaeublin, dans son étude de l’aumône à Naplouse en Cisjordanie palestinienne (2016) avance, suite à un article riche mais difficile à saisir de Paul Dresch (1998: 114-16), que pour ses interlocuteurs musulmans, la richesse est l’expression d’une abondante générosité divine (en arabe, rizq) et qu’avec Dieu, il ne peut pas y avoir de réciprocité. Mittermaier comme Schaeublin dans leurs ethnographies fines nous renvoient à la théologie islamique et s’abstiennent de toute comparaison «étique». Mais en avançant la primauté du don, ils nous indiquent un nexus de concepts qu’on pourrait qualifier de contre-sujet en musique, complémentaire au thème de la réciprocité. Julian Pitt-Rivers (1992) a proposé le concept de grâce non seulement comme fondement du christianisme, mais aussi comme un terme «étique» associé à l’idée de charité: «La grâce est toujours quelque chose de plus, au-dessus de "ce qui compte", de ce qui est obligatoire ou prévisible».

Meyer Fortes affirmait (2004 [1969]: 231-2) que la parenté trouve ses racines dans un principe de «concorde» («amity») ou «d’altruisme prescriptif», qui s’étend au-delà de la famille dans des domaines plus larges. Pour James Woodburn (1998), spécialiste des sociétés de chasseurs-cueilleurs, la réciprocité n’est pas universelle à tous les groupes humains: les Hadza de Tanzanie ne comprennent pas le concept de générosité ou de charité car ils sont profondément et fermement engagés dans le partage égalitaire. David Maybury-Lewis cite un ancien du peuple Gabra, des nomades du nord du Kenya: «Même le lait de nos propres animaux ne nous appartient pas. Nous devons le donner à ceux qui en ont besoin, parce qu’un homme pauvre est une honte pour nous tous» (Maybury-Lewis 1992: 85, d’après le travail de terrain d’Aneesa Kassam).

Les anthropologues sociaux s’intéressent aux valeurs ou principes conduisant à l’altruisme. Les biologistes, à l’inverse, classent un comportement comme altruiste dans la mesure où il réduit le succès de reproduction d’un organisme A en augmentant celui d’un organisme B. Le paradoxe de l’altruisme, l’une des plus grandes énigmes de l’évolution, a été exprimé pour la première fois par Darwin dans ses réflexions sur l’existence d’insectes stériles, et a suscité une vaste littérature scientifique (largement évitée par les anthropologues sociaux). Marshall Sahlins, cependant, s’appuyant sur les travaux du psychologue cognitif et développemental Michael Tomasello, déduit que «l’intentionnalité partagée» ou intersubjectivité est une capacité à la mutualité propre à l’être humain, non discernable chez les primates non humains (Sahlins 2001, Tomasello 2009). Dans la mesure où la science post-darwinienne a détrôné pratiquement tout autre indicateur présumé d’unicité humaine flagrante, le débat semble rester ouvert. La biographie d’un excentrique génie, George R. Price (1922-75), collègue du célèbre sociobiologiste W.D. Hamilton), explique comment il a tenté de démontrer mathématiquement qu’un comportement ostensiblement altruiste respecte en fait une échelle précisément calibrée d’intérêt personnel dépendant du degré de proximité entre le bienfaiteur et le bénéficiaire (Harman 2010).

Pour le primatologue Frans de Waal, cependant, l’altruisme humain n’est pas un problème théorique. N’en déplaise à Tomasello, il fait remonter son évolution au moment où les femelles mammifères ont commencé à nourrir leurs petits. L’empathie est associée à la libération de l’hormone ocytocine: de Waal et ses collaborateurs ont même émis le postulat que les humains et les campagnols des prairies ont en commun les mécanismes biologiques du comportement de consolation (Burkett et al. 2016). Parce que l’ocytocine nous fait nous sentir bien, la distinction entre le soin des autres et l’amour-propre, de ce point de vue, s’évanouit.

Étude de la charité avant 2000

Au cours des années 1970 et 1980, l’essor des organisations non gouvernementales (ONG) (terme non satisfaisant qui pourtant perdure) a progressivement provoqué une vague de projets d’étude dans lesquels les anthropologues ont joué un rôle significatif. L’ouvrage Imposing aid (1986) de Barbara Harrell-Bond a marqué un tournant: il s’agit d’une monographie iconoclaste sur le travail des agences d’aide internationale, basée sur son travail de terrain avec les réfugiés ougandais dans le sud du Soudan. Les institutions occidentales étaient de plus en plus dépendantes des financements gouvernementaux et soumises à la pression du respect des politiques étrangères des gouvernements; leurs idéaux caritatifs élevés les avaient largement immunisées contre la critique. Elle leur reprochait notamment le fait qu’elles ne s’efforçaient pas de donner aux «victimes» les moyens de prendre le contrôle de leur propre vie. Les critiques d’Alex de Waal (1989) étaient elles aussi très dures à l’encontre de la réponse des organisations de secours à la famine dans la Corne de l’Afrique, qui évitaient le dialogue avec les pauvres des régions rurales qu’elles étaient censées servir; quelques années plus tard, il s’attaqua à la complaisance reproduite par ce qu’il appelait «l’Internationale humanitaire». Parmi les autres ouvrages marquants d’anthropologie publiés à la même époque, on trouve The anti-politics machine de James Ferguson (1990), qui expose l’incapacité des bureaucraties de l’aide à fournir de véritables avancées aux supposés bénéficiaires du «développement».

Certains publications se sont concentrées sur l’élément marketing du travail des agences d’aide internationale, et sur le processus par lequel les catastrophes sont «érigées» en produits consommables par un oligopole d’organisations médiatiques à des fins de publicité et de collecte de fonds caritatives, afin qu’aux représentations de la souffrance de la périphérie du globe réponde constamment un flux d’aide (p. ex. Benthall 1993, Lidchi 1999). Mais la réflexion sur la charité en elle-même a été largement absente de la littérature de recherche florissante sur le développement et l’aide humanitaire. Les historiens ont comblé cette lacune: Paul Veyne sur la munificence des particuliers de la période gréco-romaine env. 300 av. J.-C. (1990 [1976]); Frank Prochaska sur la «philanthropie des pauvres envers les pauvres» en Grande-Bretagne et la «générosité royale» qui permet à la monarchie britannique de rester crédible (1988); et nombre des contributeurs au premier recueil d’essais comparatifs sur la charité à paraître (Ilchman et al., 1998), dont aucun des vingt-deux auteurs n’est anthropologue.

Il apparaît que le stimulus qui a conduit les anthropologues à réfléchir sur la charité est venu des traditions non chrétiennes, avant qu’ils commencent à se tourner vers ses manifestations chrétiennes et séculières. Cela reste cohérent avec le retard plus général de l’anthropologie à étudier le christianisme, à l’exception de l’Afrique (comme l’affirmait Cannell 2006: 1-14). Parmi les quelques exceptions trouvées avant la fin du siècle dernier, on peut citer un essai de Claudia Fonseca (1986) basé sur son travail de terrain dans un petit centre caritatif à Paris qui distribuait gratuitement des vêtements aux sans-abri. Elle y décrit le «pacte implicite» de bienveillance et de politesse établi entre certaines dames bénévoles et leurs «clients», et la transition entre l’ancienne aspiration chrétienne à gagner sa place au paradis par la charité et l’objectif plus moderne de réinsertion des pauvres dans la vie active. L’étude d’Erica Bornstein sur les ONG protestantes transnationales au Zimbabwe a rapidement rattrapé le retard et elle fut le premier chercheur sur les organisations caritatives à suivre le «traffic in meaning», la contradiction entre les attentes d’un donateur transnational individuel et les réactions des bénéficiaires finals (en l’occurrence, par l’intermédiaire du programme international de parrainage d’enfants World Vision) (Bornstein 2005).

Décentrage de la charité via l’Islam

Les réflexions susmentionnées de Jonathan Parry sur le «don gratuit» ont été inspirées par les religions dharmiques du sous-continent indien; et Katherine A. Bowie a publié un premier article sur la charité bouddhiste dans le nord de la Thaïlande, qualifiant le paradigme prévalant de «gain de mérite» bouddhiste en insistant sur la stratification des classes (1998). Mais le principal élan vers la déprovincialisation des hypothèses «occidentales» au sujet de la charité en tant que monopole euro-américain est venu de l’étude du monde musulman et de son abondant héritage de commandements religieux à la générosité, ainsi que de ses institutions caritatives. Une fois encore, les historiens ont été en première ligne (Arjomand 1998, Kozlowski 1998, Weiss (éd.) 2002, Bonner et al. 2003, Singer 2008, Fauzia 2013).

Christian Décobert, historien de l’Islam ancien, a eu l’originalité de faire le lien entre le terme coranique clé de zakat (aumône obligatoire comme la dîme hébraïque, et l’un des cinq «piliers» de l’Islam) et la théorisation de la pureté de Mary Douglas (son premier ouvrage Purity and danger de 1966,^[3] plutôt que son travail ultérieur sur la Bible), le terme zakat ayant des origines communes avec l’hébreu-araméen zakut, qui a des connotations de pureté, de rectitude et d’épanouissement, mais pas d’aumône (Décobert 1991: 198ss). Il existe aussi un chevauchement sémantique clair entre l’idée d’aumône et celle de rectitude via le mot ṣadaqa (aumône volontaire). Décobert a aussi tiré des conclusions (1991: 196) sur l’autoreprésentation et les systèmes de parenté des premières sociétés musulmanes à partir des règles établies dans le Coran à propos de la distribution de la zakat, et leur huit catégories de bénéficiaires possibles (Coran 9.60), et il a proposé un lien avec la tradition agricole d’offrande des prémices à Dieu, ouvrant ainsi des possibilités d’étude comparative qui restent à explorer plus avant (Benthall 1999, Benthall et Bellion-Jourdan 2003: 19-25).

Le lien entre le don à Dieu et le don aux nécessiteux ne s’est jamais distendu dans le monde musulman où les sacrifices d’animaux sont encore couramment pratiqués, la viande étant donnée aux pauvres (bien que dans les pays industrialisés il s’agisse souvent de viande en conserve importées commercialement des élevages de moutons néo-zélandais). Dans le Coran, les sacrifices majeurs de chameaux et de bétail retenus dans l’Islam sont représentés non seulement comme des cérémonies, mais aussi comme des moyens pratiques de nourrir les personnes dans le besoin. Les sacrifices comme la zakat sont associés à la prière et à l’affirmation de l’unicité de Dieu et de l’Islam. La pratique de la zakat a connu de nombreuses variations au cours de l’histoire de l’Islam, allant d’un contrôle total par les gouvernements, jusqu’aux dons informels par des connaissances privées pendant le mois saint du Ramadan, avec de nombreux cas intermédiaires. Mais le domaine discursif auquel elle appartient reste une réalité pour les musulmans pratiquants.

L’étude des traditions caritatives de l’Islam est particulièrement intéressante pour deux raisons. La première est que, dans pratiquement tous les pays, on trouve soit des donateurs soit des bénéficiaires musulmans, soit les deux, ce qui révèle des pratiques religieuses aussi variées que dans le monde chrétien. Ceci revêt une importance pratique en matière de politiques d’aide et de développement.

La deuxième raison est plus intellectuelle, mettant en question la prétention européenne à un universalisme séculier. D’autres traditions de charité et d’humanitarisme ont été largement ignorées. Toutes les traditions religieuses incluent des commandements de «bonnes œuvres» et on peut penser à l’essence de la charité comme à un acte physique, comme le bon Samaritain tendant la main à un voyageur en détresse ou, dans la tradition islamique, même sourire à un voisin. Mais il existe des différences subtiles. La charité chrétienne, associée à l’agapè, ne se confond pas exactement avec le champ lexical islamique, qui inclut zakat, ṣadaqa et waqf (la fondation caritative islamique). Les règles de distribution de la zakat ont attiré l’attention des érudits de l’Islam et peuvent être considérées historiquement comme ayant posé les principes d’un proto-Trésor public. Elles ont, par exemple, été interprétées comme autorisant le financement du djihad militaire. Mais le soutien aux pauvres est aujourd’hui couramment considéré comme la priorité de la zakat, voire son objet exclusif, et elle est devenue un outil de financement extrêmement efficace pour les organisations caritatives islamiques contemporaines, qui ont notamment actualisé l’insistance du Coran sur les droits des enfants orphelins.

Les auteurs d’une analyse rétrospective remarquablement approfondie d’un épisode de famine et de l’inadaptation de la réponse internationale, Famine in Somalia: competing imperatives, collectives failures, 2011-12, en arrivent à la conclusion suivante:

«Depuis la fin des années 1990, il est devenu à la mode dans la communauté de l’aide humanitaire occidentale de promouvoir les droits et d’écarter la charité en tant que solution paternaliste et avilissante. Les acteurs non occidentaux (notamment islamiques) replacent la question de la charité et de l’action volontaire au centre de l’action humanitaire, au moins en termes d’intentions» (Maxwell et Majid 2016: 196).

Ces auteurs ont été impressionnés par leur observation de la solidarité du personnel humanitaire islamique avec la communauté touchée. Les anthropologues peuvent bien convenir qu'attendre de ceux qui souffrent de la famine qu'ils comptent sur l'application de leurs droits alors qu'ils ne bénéficient d'aucun cadre juridique, n'est rien de plus qu'un trope rhétorique.

Les études basées sur des données ethnographiques de la charité islamique sunnite se sont multipliées ces dernières années. Comme les études sur les sociétés arabes menées par Mittermaier et Schaeublin (auxquelles on peut ajouter celles de Harmsen en 2008, Roy en 2011, Atia en 2013, Challand en 2014 et Juul Petersen en 2015), un ensemble de travaux sur l’Afrique de l’Ouest a émergé (Kaag en 2007, de Bruijn et van Dijk en 2009, LeBlanc et Gosselin en 2016). Les centres d’intérêt de ces études reflètent la croissance des ONG islamiques, qui remonte aux années 1980, en partie dans le sillage de la croissance des ONG en général, et en partie en conséquence de la «résurgence islamique», un effort international pour rétablir les valeurs et les pratiques islamiques. L’un des sujets qui a des implications pratiques est la question de la «proximité culturelle»: dans quelle mesure une organisation confessionnelle peut-elle améliorer son efficacité par un accès privilégié aux bénéficiaires de l’aide qui partagent les mêmes traditions religieuses (de Cordier 2009, Palmer 2011)? La réponse à cette question est globalement positive si l’on considère le travail des agences d’aide chrétiennes parmi les populations chrétiennes en Afrique et en Amérique latine. Mais ce qui aurait pu être une augmentation constante de l’acceptation et de l’influence des organisations caritatives islamiques dans le monde a été sérieusement compromis par l’ombre qui plane sur elles: les allégations persistantes d’implication dans des activités «terroristes». Une certaine responsabilité limitée des organisations caritatives du Golfe dans les années qui ont précédé le 11 septembre 2001 ne peut pas être niée, mais l’une des racines du problème remonte à la détermination des puissances occidentales à soutenir les moudjahidin pendant la guerre entre l’Union soviétique et l’Afghanistan dans les années 1980, quand l’aide humanitaire était ouvertement mêlée au soutien militaire des États-Unis à travers l’Arabie saoudite et le Pakistan (Benthall 2010: 115-18). En conséquence de quoi, de nombreuses ONG islamiques ont été blacklistées par le gouvernement américain, qui a une grande influence mondiale, ou obligées de fermer, et même celles qui présentaient un dossier irréprochable ont dû faire face à des obstacles juridiques et financiers. Malgré la publication d’avis contraires, la domination des experts du «contre-terrorisme» aux États-Unis reste forte, et ils semblent souvent (ainsi que raisonnent Schaeublin en 2008, James en 2010, 2011, de Goede en 2012, Benthall en 2016) s’attendre au pire de la part des donateurs caritatifs musulmans. Des présomptions défavorables sont aussi diffusées sur tous les musulmans «pas à leur place», ces volontaires exprimant une solidarité musulmane transnationale qui voyagent dans des régions lointaines et troublées (Li en 2010, Kassem en 2010-11).

À l’inverse, au Royaume-Uni, une autorité régulatrice ouverte aux organisations caritatives des diasporas de toutes sortes, la Charity Commission, a encouragé le développement du secteur caritatif islamique qui a établi des relations de coopération fructueuses avec l’establishment dans le domaine de l’aide, notamment en adoptant le principe de non-discrimination en raison de la religion. Le seul autre pays dans lequel les organisations caritatives islamiques se développent vigoureusement avec relativement peu d’intervention politique est l’Indonésie, qui a une longue tradition d’institutions d’assistance sociale confessionnelles (Latief 2012, Fauzia 2013). Organisation islamique majeure, la Muhammadiyah, fondée en 1912 à Yogyakarta, avait adopté explicitement le principe de non-discrimination dans ses œuvres caritatives. Mais elle est devenue plus religieusement exclusive pendant la période de libération du régime néerlandais, et son engagement à l’inclusivité n’a pas encore été formellement réaffirmé (Fauzia 2017).

Dans son ethnographie aux nombreuses facettes sur les musulmans Hui en Chine, Matthew S. Erie explore en quoi les principes islamiques traditionnels du don charitable sont négociés dans une sorte de «compétition de valeur» avec les pratiques de don dominantes des Han et avec les anxiétés sécuritaires du parti-État officiellement athée (Erie 2016). Le terme désignant le don volontaire musulman, nietie, est dérivé du terme coranique niyyah, intention ou motivation, sans distinction en chinois entre l’objet du don et l’acte de don. Conformément à la pratique Taoïste, mais contrairement au commandement coranique selon lequel le don charitable confère un mérite supplémentaire lorsqu’il est effectué en toute discrétion, les dons individuels et familiaux du nietie sont affichés nommément sur les murs des mosquées. Des collectes de nietie sont organisées pour les secours soutenus par le gouvernement après les tremblements de terre (Erie 2016: 276-9).

Le débat au sein du monde islamique sur l’éthique du don charitable s’est notamment concentré sur les règles de la zakat. Le point de vue traditionnel de la plupart des oulémas était que seuls des musulmans pouvaient en être les bénéficiaires. Libérées de cette restriction, certaines organisations caritatives islamiques ont pu faire cause commune avec les principales ONG séculières et chrétiennes. Cette différence d’interprétation des règles de la zakat, comme d’autres (telles que la mesure dans laquelle elles autorisent le prosélytisme) peuvent être vues comme intégrant des concepts qui sont au cœur des débats actuels plus larges au sein de l’Islam aujourd’hui (Benthall 2016: 18). Elles ont aussi un certain rapport avec la réflexion anthropologique sur la charité en général, dans la mesure où l’Islam, avec son histoire missionnaire et expansionniste, présente un universalisme alternatif à celui souvent pris pour acquis du Christianisme et de son héritier, l’universalisme séculier post-Lumières.

La critique de l’humanitarisme

L’étude de la charité par les anthropologues sociaux du monde entier s’est étendue ces dernières années. Ils ne s’intéressent pas tous aux mêmes questions. Par exemple, la monographie de C. Julia Huang sur le mouvement d’assistance sociale internationale Tzu Chi (fondé par une modeste nonne bouddhiste taïwanaise, la vénérable Cheng Yen – née en 1937 – et qui compte aujourd’hui des millions de sympathisants) est principalement axée sur le thème wébérien du charisme et de sa bureaucratisation (Huang 2009). Ce modèle peut notamment être applicable aux institutions caritatives de toute sorte lorsqu’elles s’étendent, du fait qu’elles sont chargées de valeurs morales fortes tout en étant obligées d’entrer en concurrence comme des entreprises. L’engagement séculaire spécifique des organisations caritatives chrétiennes dans les soins aux personnes atteintes de la lèpre (et plus récemment, dans la lutte contre leur stigmatisation) a attiré l’attention (Gussow 1989, Staples 2007). Mais ces approches semblent marginales par rapport à la tendance actuelle d’analyse des agences humanitaires.

Les professionnels des secours et du développement (parfois affublés du sobriquet de «citoyens d’Aideland») contestent souvent le fait que leur action ait quoi que ce soit à voir avec la charité. Leur position pourrait bien être un exemple de déformation professionnelle. Des initiatives multinationales ambitieuses ont appelé l’entreprise humanitaire à passer de la motivation charitable à une motivation poussée par l’impératif de «solidarité mondiale» (World Humanitarian Summit 2016: 13). Mais ce concept noble est confronté à l’évidence des inégalités internationales flagrantes, au mieux légèrement atténuées par l’action humanitaire, et manque de soutien dans la tradition usuelle. Les récents travaux des anthropologues et autres se sont ralliés à interroger l’idéologie de l’humanitarisme (p. ex. Bornstein at Redfield (éds) 2010).

Le concept de «raison humanitaire» exprimé par Didier Fassin a eu une large influence (Fassin 2011). Il entend par là une idéologique omniprésente dans le monde, moralement intouchable. En la confrontant, il cherche à faire se chevaucher les deux sens normalement contradictoires de l’idéologie: d’un côté un voile insidieux masquant des intérêts économiques brutaux (comme dans les travaux de Karl Marx) et, de l’autre côté, un système culturel qui donne un sens aux relations sociales (comme dans les travaux de Clifford Geertz). Renforcé par une ethnographie rigoureuse (il a une formation de médecin et a été vice-président de Médecins Sans Frontières) son argument selon lequel l’humanitarisme est une forme de gouvernance occidentale, dépendant de l’existence illusoire d’une «communauté internationale», apparaît comme une application de la science sociale dans toute sa splendeur. Sans aucun doute (et Fassin s’inscrit dans la droite ligne de la critique beaucoup plus ancienne de la «charité»), l’humanitarisme présente des aspects nettement conservateurs et peut même déshumaniser, en réduisant les survivants à la «vie nue» ce qu’Agamben (1995) a diagnostiqué, par exemple dans de nombreux camps de réfugiés (Agier 2014). L’ethnographie remarquable de Peter Redfield sur Médecins Sans Frontières s’appuie sur la critique d’Agamben et de Fassin tout en détaillant les réussites uniques de cette agence et en la reconnaissant comme l’une des ONG les plus autocritiques (Redfield 2013), même s’il remet par ailleurs en question l’argument excentrique de MSF selon lequel elle n’est pas une organisation «caritative», malgré le succès de ses collectes de fonds publiques (Redfield 2012: 454-7).

Entre les mains d’analystes en chambre, une approche revenant sur le concept de «biopouvoir» de Foucault (la subjugation des corps et le contrôle des populations) peut être exagérée, notamment lorsque la brutalité de nombreux régimes non occidentaux aussi bien que occidentaux est sous-estimée. Mais la critique de la «gouvernance humanitaire» a animé de nombreuses publications fondées sur l’ethnographie et portant sur la charité. Les occupants des camps de réfugiés (estimés à environ six millions de personnes en 2014 et dont le nombre a rapidement augmenté depuis) peuvent être considérés comme des objets de charité (même lorsque les administrateurs sont des agences gouvernementales ou internationales) dans la mesure ou leurs droits en tant que citoyens sont suspendus dans des espaces qui sont «hors limites» et régis par des règlements spéciaux (Agier 2014). Edward Simpson dresse le portrait intense, quoique impressionniste, des conséquences d’un tremblement de terre majeur dans l’État du Gujarat, en Inde, en 2001: dégradation du tissu social avec la complicité d’organisations philanthropiques de toute sorte (le pire exemple étant celui d’une école pour orphelins montée par un pédophile britannique). Simpson innove en y incluant des organisations indiennes locales et de la diaspora du Gujarat, de sorte que les organisations caritatives qu’il critique ne sont pas seulement celles d’origine occidentale (Simpson 2013). Maurizio Albahari a publié son ouvrage complet sur la crise des migrants en Méditerranée (2015) juste avant qu’elle n’atteigne son point d’ébullition. Même si Albahari est sensible à tous les autres aspects de la crise après une décennie de recherches, c’est son travail bénévole en 2005 dans un centre de demandeurs d’asile dans une petite ville côtière du talon de la botte italienne qui confère à son livre toute son autorité. Albahari y montre comment une myriade d’organisations caritatives religieuses et séculières, soi-disant indépendantes, ont assumé de facto un rôle de gendarme. Sa monographie soutient l’argument selon lequel les critiques les plus approfondies des efforts caritatifs restent aujourd’hui celles renforcées par l’observation participante, comme dans les premiers travaux d’Harrell-Bond et Alex de Waal. Liisa H. Malkki (2015) diagnostique un «besoin» chez les professionnels de la Croix Rouge finlandaise qui ont servi à l’étranger: ils sont frustrés par la routine de la vie de classe moyenne, rendue plus difficile à supporter par les longs hivers, et recherchent une sorte d’épanouissement personnel qu’ils ne peuvent pas obtenir chez eux. Les anthropologues de l’hémisphère Nord reconnaîtront peut-être ce sentiment.

Un modèle holistique

L’école germano-néerlandaise d’anthropologie présente un modèle méthodologique dans lequel l’étude des initiatives caritatives peut être insérée. Ce modèle s’appuie sur un concept étendu de sécurité sociale, décrit par Franz et Keebet von Benda-Beckman comme la «dimension de l’organisation sociale s’agissant de tous les aspects de sécurité non considérés comme dépendant exclusivement de la responsabilité individuelle» (Thelan et al. 2009). L’un des mérites de cette démarche méthodologique est qu’elle prête totalement attention aux points de vue des bénéficiaires de la charité et à la question de l’évaluation de son efficacité. Cinq «couches» de description sont identifiées: les notions idéologiques et culturelles de risque et de soin; la prise en charge institutionnelle, basée sur des droits clairement définis; les relations sociales existant entre les fournisseurs et les bénéficiaires; les actions concrètes telles que l’assistance de personne à personne, et le transfert de ressources; et enfin, les conséquences des interventions pour les fournisseurs comme pour les bénéficiaires. Carolin Leutloff-Grandits (2009) applique cette méthode dans un article sur le changement des réponses caritatives face à l’effondrement des structures étatiques en ex-Yougoslavie. Dans la ville croate ethniquement mixte de Knin en 2001, au lendemain de la guerre serbo-croate, la branche locale de l’organisation catholique Caritas a lancé une campagne caritative émouvante pour les «Croates affamés» de la ville, adoptant ce que Leutloff-Grandits appelle une «politique offensive d’ingénierie ethnique» par d’autres moyens. Une préférence a été affichée pour les Croates nouvellement arrivés de Bosnie, causant un ressentiment à la fois parmi les catholiques croates et les orthodoxes serbes de retour. Parmi les quelques publications détaillées qui prennent en compte toutes les «couches» de l’analyse émise par les von Benda-Beckman (même si elles ne se rangent pas à leurs suggestions), on peut distinguer Famine in Somalia (2016) de Maxwell et Majid et Crimes of peace (2015) d’Albahari, toutes deux déjà mentionnées.

Conclusion: du progrès dans la charité?

Au cours de la parenthèse de la moitié du XXe siècle susmentionnée, entre les écrits de Mauss et Westermarck et les contributions innovantes d’Harrell-Bond, Alex de Waal et Parry, un anthropologue a fait figure d’exception en portant un intérêt soutenu au thème de la charité: R.R. Marett. Il écrit ainsi: «le vrai progrès est le progrès de la charité, toutes les autres avancées lui étant secondaires» (Marett 1935: 40). Il considérait les soins maternels comme la source première de la charité (Marett 1939: 141, 147). Même si son style peut sembler sentimental aux lecteurs d’aujourd’hui, il peut être considéré comme annonciateur de Fortes sur la concorde et Frans de Waal sur l’ocytocine. Cependant, une réflexion sur la charité ne peut ignorer la présence de la réciprocité qui plane et menace toujours la pureté du don gratuit. La Bhagavad Gita reconnaissait ce dilemme moral il y a plus de deux millénaires.

La phrase de Marett sur le progrès résonne aujourd’hui et nous invite à nous questionner sur ce que nous devrions considérer comme le progrès. Depuis les années 1960, un mouvement informe connu sous le nom de «responsabilité sociale d’entreprise» peut être considéré comme une variante moderne de la charité, et ses manifestations font l’objet d’une attention ethnographique, par exemple en Afrique du Sud (Rajak 2011) et en Arabie saoudite (Derbal 2014: 146-53). Parmi les innovations plus récentes méritant d’être étudiées, on peut citer l’apparition de cabinets de consultants qui donnent aux jeunes héritiers des conseils sur la meilleure façon de devenir des donateurs philanthropes.

Quoi qu’il en soit, ce qui fut qualifié avec condescendance «d’anthropologie appliquée» semble aujourd’hui reprendre de la vigueur au sein de la discipline. Les opportunités sont nombreuses pour les anthropologues de s’appuyer sur les travaux précédents en matière de charité d’une façon à la fois utile sur le plan pratique et sophistiquée sur le plan théorique, à un moment où la demande de don volontaire et de bénévolat est plus importante que jamais.

Notes de l’auteur

Cet article utilise du matériel déjà publié par l’auteur dans trois autres articles de synthèse: ‘Charity’ dans Fassin, D. (éd.) 2012. A companion to moral anthropology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell); ‘Religion and humanitarianism’, dans MacGinty R. & J.H. Peterson (éds) 2015. The Routledge companion to humanitarian action (London: Routledge); ‘Humanitarianism as ideology and practice’ dans Callan H. (éd.) 2018. The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of anthropology. Je présente mes remerciements aux éditeurs pour les opportunités de réflexion qu’ils m’ont données. Cet article doit beaucoup à Felix Stein comme éditeur de mise en service, et à deux examinateurs anonymes.

Bibliographie

Les publications qui sont possiblement les plus utiles comme lecture introductoire sont marquées avec un astérisque.

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Auteur

Jonathan Benthall est chercheur honoraire affilié au département d’anthropologie du University College London et directeur émérite de l’Institut Royal d’Anthropologie de Grande-Bretagne. Son livre le plus récent s’appelle Islamic charities and Islamic humanism in troubled times (2016).

Jonathan Benthall, Downingbury Farmhouse, Pembury, Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN2 4AD, United Kingdom. jonathanbenthall@hotmail.com

[1] Cet article est une traduction de l’original intitulé “Charity” (Benthall 2017)

[2] Traduction anglaise, The Gift. Texte original français en version numérique: http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/socio_et_anthropo/2_essai_sur_le_don/essai_sur_le_don.html

[3] Traduction française: De la souillure: Essai sur les notions de pollution et de tabou (Paris: Maspéro, 1971).

Precarity

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

Sharryn Kasmir

Hofstra University

Initially published 13 Mar 2018

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

Abstract:

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

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

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

Precarity

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

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

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

The ontological condition of precariousness

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

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

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

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

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

Precarity as part of neoliberal capitalism

A new historical moment?

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

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

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

Precarity in historical and global context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘Precariat’ and class formation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: the politics of labour

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

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

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

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

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Note on contributor

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

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

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

Charity

Felix Stein — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 16:34:20 +0000

Jonathan Benthall

University College London

Initially published 22 Dec 2017

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

Abstract:

This entry considers charity as an ‘etic’ term that facilitates comparison between different traditions. Theoretical foundations were laid by two great anthropologists at the beginning of the twentieth century: Marcel Mauss, whose The gift has elicited a wealth of varied interpretations on the theme of exchange and reciprocity; and Edvard Westermarck, behind whose dated assumptions about a hierarchy of ‘races’ we may discern some lasting insights into the relationship between charity and religion. The simple view that all charitable giving is merely a down payment on benefits to be received later (in this world or in the hereafter) has to be qualified by evidence of ‘mutuality’ as an aspect of human coexistence complementary to reciprocity.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, some anthropologists turned a critical eye on the work of Western aid agencies. But it was largely left to historians to reflect on charity per se. After the cooling of anthropological interest in charity, it was first the dharmic religions of the Indian subcontinent and then Islam that reignited it and stimulated the process of ‘deprovincialising’ the common assumption that charity is a monopoly of the Euro-American tradition. Though social anthropologists have studied many other manifestations of charity, detailed attention is given here to the Qur’anic prescriptions relating to good works and to the ways in which they have empowered the formation of organised Islamic charities, whose practical and potential efficacy has been thwarted by an arguably excessive political reaction since the 11^th September 2001 attacks on the United States.

Anthropologists have contributed to the critique of humanitarianism as an ideology, and examples are given here of productive field-based research projects that have drawn on this critique. Finally, a holistic methodological aid is summarised which may be helpful in structuring research on charity, and it is recalled that the problematic nature of charity which anthropologists try to resolve today was noticed by the author of the Bhagavad Gita some centuries before the contemporary era.

Introduction

The word ‘charity’ in English refers to almsgiving and freewill offerings, but it also has connotations of spiritual love, the highest Christian virtue. It was used in some Bibles to translate, via the Latin caritas, the Greek New Testament word agapē. Some Christian apologists, for instance in the Catholic Encyclopedia, conflate the two senses of the word. In Elizabethan England, ‘charity’ also acquired a restrictive legal definition that is still an essential part of British and American law. A distinction is often made in European languages between ‘charity’ and ‘philanthropy’. For the ancient Greeks, ‘philanthropy’ was ‘love of the principle of humanity’. But it became fused, during the century of the Enlightenment, with the idea of public benefactions shorn of religious connotations, and today it has come to be associated particularly with the munificence of the rich, and patronage of high culture (also more recently with the promise of funding for development in much of the Global South).

All attempts so far to study our subject comparatively have dispensed with the charity/philanthropy distinction, one good reason being that it has no parallels in major non-European languages such as Arabic or Hindi. Another widely used term, ‘humanitarian action’, is problematic because the word ‘humanitarian’ can be taken colloquially to encompass all forms of philanthropic or altruistic action; but humanitarianism as a movement can be defined as an ideology traceable back to the nineteenth century (Davies 2012). (More tightly, International Humanitarian Law is the body of measures intended to limit the effects of armed conflict, and is outside the scope of this entry). If we look for a comparative, i.e. ‘etic’ term, as opposed to the above culturally embedded or ‘emic’ categories, then ‘good works’ is as serviceable as any; but in this entry, the term ‘charity’ will be used in an inclusive sense.

Theoretical foundations

Two giants of anthropology laid the foundations, at the beginning of the twentieth century, for our discipline’s theoretical understanding of charity. Foremost has been Marcel Mauss’s essay on reciprocity and social solidarity, The gift (2016 [1925]). Mauss’s claim that the principle of exchange penetrates every aspect of social life, in the ‘atmosphere of the gift …, of obligation and of liberty mixed together’ (2016: 177), has stimulated productive but sometimes confusing debate (Testart 1998; Guyer 2016). The other pioneer, though less widely remembered in this field, was Edvard Westermarck. He adhered to Victorian assumptions about a hierarchy of savage and civilised ‘races’, but his global comparison of charitable traditions (1909), still impressive today, explains how mutual aid is commonly influenced by egoistic motives, and, more arrestingly, how charity in all the ‘higher religions’ has been associated with sacrifice.

It may be asked why social-cultural anthropology failed to build on Mauss’s and Westermarck’s insights on charity until the last quarter of the century. The explanation may be that most anthropologists positioned themselves politically on a spectrum between a social reformism that disparaged charity as addressing symptoms rather than causes, legitimating the privileges of the rich, and strict Marxism, firmly opposed to charity as a brake on the inevitable proletarian revolution. But the consequence of rejecting private charity is to place all power in the hands of the state. Out-and-out hostility to charity, as an adjunct to entitlements paid for by taxation, is much less frequently expressed by social researchers today, especially because of the prevalence of partnership arrangements between charitable organizations and governments. Moreover, a frequent theme in recent research literature is the role of private charity in compensating for the retreat of the welfare state, most damagingly in former communist countries such as Russia (Caldwell 2016).

Jonathan Parry’s commentary on Mauss’s The gift (1986) sparked three decades of academic debate about this text. Parry’s somewhat provocative argument was that the pure or free gift, associated with salvation religions – a voluntary surrender of resources without expectation of return – is a kind of dialectical complement to the commodification of goods that dominates Western industrial societies. Shortly afterwards, Mary Douglas (1990), making no reference to Parry in her introduction to an English translation of The gift, deprecated the very notion of a free gift. For our present purpose, we may extract two linked suggestions from Mauss’s essay.

First, when a gift cannot be reciprocated, moral credit accrues to the donor but the recipient suffers a wound. Hence the reputation for ‘coldness’ that organised charity in Europe has often acquired since the nineteenth century, especially when it evacuates face-to-face relationships between donors and recipients. Social reformers sought to replace it with the welfare state. Some Indian ethnography reveals an interpretation of charitable giving as especially sinister: unreciprocated gifts made to priests and renouncers can bring misfortune that migrates from donor to recipient unless careful precautions are taken.

Second, a ‘free’ gift cannot admit any dimension of reciprocity. When I make a gift, I must do so in such a way as to deny to others – and indeed, to myself – that it has a transactional aspect or that I will be rewarded, whether in this world or in the ‘celestial economy’ of the hereafter. Though this paradox is salient in all the three Abrahamic religions, it is in India that it is worked through with most sophistication. The Bhagavad Gita (17.20-22, see also Bornstein 2009: 624-5, 644) distinguishes ‘charity in the mode of goodness’ (given with no expectation of reward) from ‘charity in the mode of passion’ (with intent of recompense, or given grudgingly) and ‘charity in the mode of darkness’ (given at the wrong place or time, to an unworthy recipient, or with disrespect). James Laidlaw describes how in the Shvetambar (‘white-clad’) sect of Indian Jainism, when itinerant celibate renouncers collect food in alms bowls from lay families, they show ‘surly indifference’ rather than showing thanks or appreciation – their aim being not to create social relations but to achieve a timeless spiritual perfection (Laidlaw 2000: 632). According to Hilal Alkan-Zeybek (2012), Islamic volunteering by middle and upper class women to assist poor people in a city in central Anatolia aims at exactly the opposite: enhancing solidarity through bodily contact, and ‘ethical transformation’ of the giver, so that class hierarchies are mitigated. Erica Bornstein’s monograph based on fieldwork in Delhi shows how the beliefs and practices aggregated as modern ‘Hinduism’ interact with Buddhist, Islamic, Christian and secular traditions to form a diversified charitable landscape, both international and intra-Indian (Bornstein 2012).

Interpretations of Mauss are complicated by the fact that he saw all gifts as metaphorically entailing sacrifice: when I make a gift, I give a part of myself. Westermarck stressed that in both Jewish and Christian teaching, almsgiving came to replace sacrificial offerings to God. Charity in general is habitually either praised as an expression of empathy or else depreciated as appeasing the conscience of donors and maintaining the status quo, but Westermarck suggests a third way of conceiving it: as an act of devotion. The prayers offered by beneficiaries are, in the Abrahamic traditions, one way in which they can offer a return – the obverse being curses uttered by those who are unjustly treated. Ilana Silber has argued that subtle ‘echoes’ of sacrificial ideologies and practices still reverberate across long stretches of time, as in the Christian injunction that charitable giving is one way for the faithful to emulate God’s free gift of Jesus’s self-sacrifice (Silber 305, 310). She argues for the need to distinguish three kinds of religious giving in the Hebrew Testament: gifts to the gods, to religious officials, and to the needy. The Christian doctrine of diakonīa or service, however, insists that anything done to benefit the hungry, thirsty, homeless, naked, sick or imprisoned is equivalent to performing the same service for God (Matthew 25: 31-46). Amira Mittermaier, in an article on Islamic voluntarism in Egypt (2014) following Fassin (2012), strongly associates the Christian and post-Christian tradition of charity with compassion, as opposed to religious dutifulness such as she observed in the practice of some of her Cairene Muslim interlocutors. But the history of charitable institutions across all Christian denominations and institutions is so varied that there is a danger here of over-generalization about their motivations, which include renunciation, self-denial and expiation, as well as compassion.

In keeping with a general trend in the social sciences towards recognising the porosity of the distinction between the religious and the ‘secular’, a ‘quasi-religious’ character may be attributed to some of the most successful secular humanitarian and development agencies (Barnett & Stein 2012), inasmuch as they are empowered by strongly internalised moral principles, reverence for charismatic founders, and an engagement with the world as a whole. Philip Fountain, stimulated by his ethnographic research with the Mennonite Central Committee, a North American Christian development agency, has pursued this conceptual problem, starting from the reflection that maybe ‘all development, whether labelled religious or otherwise, is incurably proselytizing’ in that it sets out to rework the social practices of others (Fountain 2015).

Reciprocity versus mutuality

Some ethnographic studies suggest that analysis of charity confined to equations of offerings and rewards may be too one-dimensional; and they point us to unresolved anthropological debates about the relationship between reciprocity and mutuality, and the nature of altruism.

Mittermaier, in another article (2013), draws a contrast, based on her fieldwork in Egypt in 2011–12, between an economy of blessing (baraka), which stresses generosity, and an economy of recompense (thawāb) aimed at securing a place in paradise: the latter model, according to her, has been accentuated by the march of capitalism in Arab societies. Emanuel Schaeublin, in his study of almsgiving in Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank (2016), argues, following a rich but elusive article by Paul Dresch (1998: 114-16), that for his Muslim interlocutors wealth is an expression of abundant divine provision (in Arabic, rizq), and with God there can be no reciprocity. Both Mittermaier and Schaeublin in their fine-grained ethnographies refer us to Islamic theology and abstain from ‘etic’ comparison. But in arguing for the primacy of giving they point us to a nexus of concepts that may be thought of as like a countersubject in music, complementary to the theme of reciprocity. Julian Pitt-Rivers (1992) proposed the concept of grace not only as fundamental to Christianity but also as an ‘etic’ term associated with the idea of charity: ‘Grace is always something extra, over and above “what counts”, what is obligatory or predictable’.

Meyer Fortes argued ([1969] 2004, 231-2) that kinship is rooted in a principle of ‘amity’ or ‘prescriptive altruism’, which is extended outside the family into wider domains. For James Woodburn (1998), an authority on hunter-gatherer societies, reciprocity is not universal to all human groups: the Hadza of Tanzania would not understand the concept of generosity or charity, being profoundly and assertively committed to egalitarian sharing. David Maybury-Lewis quotes from an elder of the Gabra people, pastoral nomads in northern Kenya: ‘Even the milk from our own animals does not belong to us. We must give to those who need it, for a poor man shames us all’ (Maybury-Lewis 1992: 85, based on fieldwork by Aneesa Kassam).

Social anthropologists are concerned with values or principles conducing to altruism. Biologists, by contrast, categorise behaviour as altruistic insofar as it decreases the reproductive success of organism A while increasing that of organism B. The paradox of altruism, one of evolution’s greatest riddles, was first articulated by Darwin in his reflections on the existence of sterile insects, and has elicited a vast scientific literature – largely bypassed by social anthropologists. Marshall Sahlins, however, drawing on the work of the developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello, deduces that ‘shared intentionality’ or intersubjectivity is a uniquely human capacity for mutuality, not discernable among non-human primates (Sahlins 2011, Tomasello 2009). Inasmuch as post-Darwinian science has dethroned almost every other presumed indicator of stark human uniqueness, the debate should be assumed to be still open. The biography of an eccentric genius, George R. Price (1922–75, a colleague of the more famous sociobiologist W. D. Hamilton), explains how he set out to prove mathematically that ostensibly altruistic behaviour actually conforms to a precisely calibrated scale of self-interest depending on the benefactor’s degree of relatedness to the beneficiary (Harman 2010). For the primatologist Frans de Waal, however, human altruism is not a theoretical problem. Pace Tomasello, he sees it as having evolved when female mammals began to nurture their young. Empathy is associated with the release of the hormone oxytocin: de Waal and his co-workers have even postulated that biological mechanisms for consolation behaviour are conserved between prairie voles and humans (Burkett et al. 2016). Because oxytocin makes us feel good, the sharp line between care for others and self-love, according to this view, falls away.

Research on charity pre-2000

During the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) – an unsatisfactory term which has nonetheless stuck – gradually provoked a spate of research projects in which anthropologists played a significant role. Barbara Harrell-Bond’s Imposing aid (1986) was a landmark: an iconoclastic monograph on the work of international aid agencies, based on her fieldwork with Ugandan refugees in southern Sudan. Western institutions were increasingly dependent on government funding and pressured to comply with government foreign policies; their high charitable ideals had largely immunised them from criticism. She faulted them specially for failing to make the effort to empower ‘victims’ to take control of their own lives. Equally hard-hitting was Alex de Waal’s criticism (1989) of relief organizations’ response to famine in the Horn of Africa, which avoided dialogue with the rural poor whom they were supposed to serve; a few years later he attacked the self-reproducing complacency of what he called the ‘Humanitarian International’. Among other influential books by anthropologists published at about the same time was James Ferguson’s The anti-politics machine (1990), which exposed the failure of aid bureaucracies to deliver real benefits to the supposed beneficiaries of ‘development’.

Some publications focussed on the element of marketing in the work of overseas aid agencies, and on the process whereby disasters are ‘constructed’ as consumables via an oligopoly of media organizations for the purpose of campaigning and charitable fundraising, so that the flow of representations of suffering from the global periphery is continuously reciprocated by aid flows (e.g. Benthall 1993, Lidchi 1999). But reflection on charity per se was largely absent from the burgeoning research literature on development and disaster relief. Historians made up for this gap: Paul Veyne on munificence by private individuals in the Greco-Roman period from c. 300 BC ([1976] 1990); Frank Prochaska on the ‘philanthropy of the poor to the poor’ in Britain, and the ‘royal bounty’ that enables the modern British monarchy to remain credible (1988); many of the contributors to the first collection of comparative essays on charity to be published (Ilchman et al., 1998), with not a single anthropologist among its twenty-two authors.

It appears that the stimulus for anthropologists to reflect on charity came from non-Christian traditions, before they began to turn to its Christian and secular manifestations. This would be in keeping with anthropology’s more general tardiness in studying Christianity, except in Africa (as argued by Cannell 2006: 1-14). Among the few exceptions to be found before the end of the last century is an essay by Claudia Fonseca (1986) based on her fieldwork in a small charitable centre in Paris that distributed free clothing to down-and-outs. She describes the ‘implicit pact’ of goodwill and politeness established between some of the lady volunteers and their ‘clients’, and the transition between the older Christian aspiration of gaining a path to paradise through charity and the more modern aim of reinserting poor people into the workforce. Erica Bornstein’s study of transnational Protestant NGOs in Zimbabwe made up quickly for lost ground, and she was the first researcher on charities to follow through the ‘traffic in meaning’ arising at cross purposes between the expectations of an individual transnational donor and the reactions of eventual recipients – in this case through World Vision’s global child sponsorship programme (Bornstein 2005).

Decentring of charity via Islam

Jonathan Parry’s aforementioned reflections on the ‘free gift’ were inspired by the dharmic religions of the Indian subcontinent; and Katherine A. Bowie published an early article on Buddhist charity in northern Thailand, qualifying the prevailing paradigm of Buddhist merit-making with her stress on class stratification (1998). But the main impetus towards deprovincialising ‘Western’ assumptions about charity as a Euro-American monopoly came from studying the Muslim world and its abundant legacy of religious injunctions to generosity, as well as actual charitable institutions. Again, historians have been well to the fore (Arjomand 1998, Kozlowski 1998, Weiss (ed.) 2002, Bonner et al. 2003, Singer 2008, Fauzia 2013).

One historian of early Islam, Christian Décobert, had the originality to make a connection between the key Qur’anic term zakat – mandatory almsgiving, like the Hebraic tithe, and one of the five ‘pillars’ of Islam – and Mary Douglas’s theorising on purity (her early Purity and danger (1966) rather than her later work on the Bible). For zakat has common origins with the Hebrew-Aramaic zakut, which had connotations of purity, rectitude and thriving, but not of almsgiving (Décobert 1991: 198ff). There is also a clear semantic overlap between the idea of alms and that of rectitude via the word ṣadaqa (voluntary almsgiving). Décobert also drew inferences (1991: 196) about the self-representation and kinship systems of early Muslim societies from the rules laid down in the Qur’an about the distribution of zakat, with their eight categories of eligible beneficiaries (Qur’an 9.60), and he proposed a link with the agricultural tradition of offering firstfruits to God, thus opening up opportunities for comparative study which have yet to be fully explored (Benthall 1999, Benthall & Bellion-Jourdan 2003: 19-25).

The connection between giving to God and giving to the needy has never slackened throughout the Muslim world, in many parts whereof animal sacrifice is still routinely practised, with the meat given to the poor (though in industrialised countries it is as likely today to be canned meat imported commercially from New Zealand sheep farms). In the Qur’an, the major sacrifices of camels and cattle that were retained in Islam are represented as not only ceremonies but also a practical means of feeding the needy. Both sacrifice and zakat are associated with prayer and with affirming the oneness of God and Islam. The practice of zakat has undergone many variations during the history of Islam – ranging between, on the one hand, complete control by governments, and, on the other, informal gifts through private connections during the holy month of Ramadan, with many intermediate cases. But the discursive field to which it belongs remains a reality for devout Muslims.

Studying Islamic charitable traditions is of particular interest for two reasons. First, in almost all countries there are either Muslim donors or Muslim recipients or both – revealing as much variety of religious practices as may be found within Christendom. This is of practical importance for aid and development policies.

The second reason is more intellectual, calling into question European claims to secular universalism. Other traditions of charity and humanitarianism were generally disregarded. All religious traditions embody injunctions to ‘good works’, and we may think of the essence of charity as a bodily act, such as reaching out with a hand like the Good Samaritan to a traveller in distress, or, in the Islamic tradition, even smiling at a neighbour. But there are subtle differences. Christian charity, with its association with agapē, does not overlap exactly with the Islamic lexical field, which includes zakat, ṣadaqa and waqf (the Islamic charitable foundation). The rules for the distribution of zakat have been given much attention by Islamic scholars, and may be seen historically as having set out the principles of a proto-state treasury. They have, for instance, been interpreted as authorising finance for military jihad. But support for the poor is usually today regarded as zakat’s primary or even exclusive purpose, and it has been turned into a highly effective fundraising tool by contemporary Islamic charities, especially in actualising the Qur’an’s insistence on the rights of orphaned children.

The authors of a remarkably thorough retrospective analysis of a famine and the inadequate global response to it, Famine in Somalia: competing imperatives, collective failures, 2011–12, conclude:

‘Since the late 1990s, it has become fashionable in the Western humanitarian aid community to promote rights, and to dismiss charity as paternalistic and demeaning. Non-Western actors – particularly Islamic actors – put the issues of charity and of voluntary action squarely back in the centre of humanitarian action, at least in terms of intentions’ (Maxwell & Majid 2016: 196).

These authors were impressed by their observation of Islamic aid workers’ ‘solidarity with the affected community’. Anthropologists may well concur that it is no more than a rhetorical trope to expect those suffering from famine to rely on their rights when they have no juridical entitlements.

Ethnographically grounded research on Sunni Islamic charity has accelerated in recent years. As well as studies on Arab societies by Mittermaier and Schaeublin – to which may be added Harmsen 2008, Roy 2011, Atia 2013, Challand 2014, and Juul Petersen 2015 – a body of work on West Africa has emerged (Kaag 2007, de Bruijn & van Dijk 2009, LeBlanc & Gosselin 2016). Research interest has reflected the growth of Islamic NGOs, which took off in the 1980s partly in line with the growth of NGOs in general, and partly as a result of the ‘Islamic resurgence’ – the worldwide endeavour to re-establish Islamic values and practices. One topic with practical implications is the question of ‘cultural proximity’: to what extent can an international faith-based organization improve its effectiveness through privileged access to aid recipients who share the same religious tradition (de Cordier 2009, Palmer 2011)? The answer to the question is mainly positive when we consider the work of Christian aid agencies among Christian populations in Africa and Latin America. But what could otherwise have been a steady increase in the acceptance and influence of Islamic charities worldwide has been seriously compromised by a shadow hanging over it: persistent allegations of implication in ‘terrorist’ activities. Some limited culpability on the part of Gulf-based charities in the years leading up to 11^th September 2001 cannot be denied, but one root of the problem goes back to the determination of the Western powers to back the mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan war of the 1980s, when humanitarian aid was blatantly mixed with military support by the USA through Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (Benthall 2010: 115-8). The outcome is that many Islamic NGOs have been blacklisted by the US Government with its global reach, or forced to close down, and even those with an impeccable record have had to face legal and financial obstacles. The dominance of ‘counter-terrorist’ experts in the USA remains strong despite the publication of contrary views, and often seems (as argued by Schaeublin 2008, James 2010–11, de Goede 2012, Benthall 2016) to assume the worst of Muslim charitable donors. Adverse presumptions are also disseminated about all ‘Muslims out of place’, volunteers expressing transnational Muslim solidarity who travel in distant and troubled regions (Li 2010, Kassem 2010–11).

By contrast, in the United Kingdom a government regulator sympathetic to diaspora charities of all kinds, the Charity Commission, has encouraged the growth of an Islamic charity sector that has established fruitful cooperative relations with the mainstream aid establishment – especially by embracing the principle of non-discrimination with regard to religion. The only other country where Islamic charities can be said to flourish vigorously with relatively little political intervention is Indonesia, which has a long tradition of faith-based welfare institutions (Latief 2012, Fauzia 2013). A major Islamic organization, the Muhammadiyah, founded in 1912 in Yogyakarta, came to adopt explicitly the principle of non-discrimination in its charitable works. But it became more religiously exclusive during the period of liberation from Dutch rule, and the commitment to inclusivity has not yet been formally reaffirmed (Fauzia 2017).

In his many-faceted ethnography of Hui Muslims in China, Matthew S. Erie explores how traditional Islamic principles of charitable giving are negotiated in a kind of ‘value competition’ with mainstream Han Chinese gift practices and with the security anxieties of the officially atheist Party-State (Erie 2016). The term for Muslim voluntary giving, nietie, is derived from the Qur’anic term niyyah, intent or motivation, without distinction in Chinese between the thing given and the act of giving. In conformity with Daoist practice, but contrary to the Qur’anic injunction that charitable giving gains extra merit when it is given discreetly, individual and family donations of nietie are posted on walls in mosques by name. Collections of nietie are organised for government-sponsored relief aid after earthquakes (Erie 2016: 276-9).

Debate within the Islamic world about the ethics of charitable giving has focused especially on the rules of zakat. The traditional view of most ulama was that only Muslims could be beneficiaries. When released from this restriction, Islamic charities have found common cause with the mainstream of secular and Christian NGOs. This and other differences on how to interpret the zakat rules – such as to what extent they authorise proselytism – may be seen as encapsulating concepts that go to the heart of wider current debates within Islam today (Benthall 2016: 18). They also have a bearing on anthropological reflection about charity in general, in that Islam, with its missionary and expansionary history, presents an alternative universalism to the often taken-for-granted universalism of Christianity and its legatee, post-Enlightenment secular universalism.

The critique of humanitarianism

Research by social anthropologists on charity all over the world has expanded in recent years. They are not all interested in the same questions. For instance, C. Julia Huang’s monograph on the international Tzu Chi social welfare movement – founded by an unassuming Taiwanese Buddhist nun, the Venerable Cheng Yen (b. 1937) and now numbering millions of supporters – is primarily concerned with the Weberian theme of charisma and its bureaucratization (Huang 2009). This model may be specially applicable to charitable institutions of every kind as they expand, in that they are empowered by strongly held moral values while also obliged to compete as corporate bodies. The specific centuries-old commitment of Christian charities to the care and healing of leprosy sufferers – and latterly to opposing their stigmatization – has attracted attention (Gussow 1989, Staples 2007). But these approaches seem marginal to the current trend in the analysis of humanitarian agencies.

Practitioners in relief and development – sometimes mocked as citizens of ‘aidland’ – habitually deny that what they are doing has anything to do with charity. This may be an instance of déformation professionnelle. Ambitious multinational initiatives have called for the humanitarian enterprise to change from one driven by charity to one driven by the imperative of ‘global solidarity’ (World Humanitarian Summit 2016: 13). But this high-minded concept is at odds with the actual evidence of gross global inequalities, never more than slightly mitigated by humanitarian action, and it lacks the underpinning of any vernacular tradition. Recent work by anthropologists and others has turned to holding the ideology of humanitarianism up to the light (e.g. Bornstein & Redfield (eds) 2010).

Didier Fassin’s concept of ‘humanitarian reason’ has been widely influential (Fassin 2011). By this he means a globally pervasive, morally untouchable idéologique, in confronting which he seeks to straddle the two normally contradictory senses of ideology: on the one hand, an insidious veil obscuring brutal economic interests (as in the works of Karl Marx), and, on the other hand, a cultural system that makes sense of social relations (as in the works of Clifford Geertz). Complemented by careful ethnography – he was trained as a physician and served as a vice-president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, aka Doctors Without Borders) – his contention that humanitarianism is a form of Western governance, dependent on the fantasy that an ‘international community’ exists, seems an application of social science at its best. Without doubt – and this follows on from the much older critique of ‘charity’ – humanitarianism has markedly conservative aspects and can even dehumanise, reducing survivors to the ‘bare life’ diagnosed by Agamben (1995) as in many refugee camps (Agier 2014). An impressive ethnography, Peter Redfield’s monograph on MSF, draws on the Agamben–Fassin critique while also recognising and detailing this agency’s unique achievements as one of the most effective and most self-critical NGOs (Redfield 2013), though he has incidentally questioned MSF’s eccentric contention that it is not a ‘charity’ despite its famous successes in public fundraising (Redfield 2012: 454-7).

In the hands of armchair social scientists, an approach dwelling on Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’ – the subjugation of bodies and control of populations – can be overdone, especially when the brutality of many non-Western as well as Western regimes is underestimated. But the critique of ‘humanitarian governance’ has animated many recent ethnographically grounded publications bearing on charity. The occupants of refugee camps – estimated at about six million persons in 2014, and fast growing in numbers since then – may be seen as objects of charity (even when the administrators are state or interstate agencies) in that their rights of citizenship are suspended in spaces that are ‘off limits’ and governed by special regulations (Agier 2014). Edward Simpson provides a searing, if impressionistic, study of the aftermath of a major earthquake in Guajarat, India, in 2001: a degradation of the social fabric in which philanthropic organizations of all kinds connived – the worst case being a school for boy orphans set up by a British paedophile. Simpson breaks new ground by including coverage of local Indian organizations and Gujarati diasporas, so that the charities that he criticises are not only those of Western origin (Simpson 2013). Maurizio Albahari went to press with his comprehensive book on the Mediterranean migrant crisis (2015) just before it reached boiling point. Though Albahari is sensitive to all other aspects of the crisis after a decade of research, it is his voluntary work in 2005 at a reception centre for asylum seekers in a small coastal town on the heel of Italy that gives his book a first-hand authority. Albahari shows how a myriad of religious and secular charities, nominally independent, assumed a de facto policing role. His monograph supports the contention that the most searching critiques of charitable endeavours are still today those that are fortified by participant observation, as in the earlier work of Harrell-Bond and Alex de Waal. Liisa H. Malkki (2015) diagnoses a ‘neediness’ among Finnish Red Cross professional staff who have served abroad: they are frustrated by the routines of middle-class life, made less bearable by the long winters, and look for a kind of personal fulfilment unobtainable at home. Anthropologists from the Global North may recognise the feeling.

A holistic template

The German–Dutch school of anthropology contributes a methodological template into which research on charitable initiatives may be inserted. The template relies on an expanded concept of social security, described by Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckman as ‘the dimension of social organization dealing with the provision of security not considered to be an exclusive matter of individual responsibility’ (Thelan et al. 2009). One merit of this methodological démarche is that it pays full attention to the viewpoints of the recipients of charity and to the question of evaluating efficacy. Five ‘layers’ of description are identified: ideological and cultural notions of risk and caring; institutional provision, based on clearly defined rights; actual social relationships between providers and recipients; concrete actions such as person-to-person assistance, and the transfer of resources; and finally the consequences of interventions for both providers and recipients. Carolin Leutloff-Grandits (2009) applies this method in an article on changing charitable responses in the face of the breakdown of state structures in former Yugoslavia. In the ethnically mixed Croatian town of Knin in 2001 during the aftermath of the Croat–Serb war, the local branch of the Catholic Caritas organization launched an emotive charity campaign for ‘hungry Croats’ in the town, adopting what Leutloff-Grandits calls a ‘war policy of ethnic engineering’ by other means. Preference was shown to Croatian settlers from Bosnia, causing resentment among both the Catholic Croat and the Orthodox Serb returnees. From the few full-length published studies that do justice to all the ‘layers’ of analysis specified by the von Benda-Beckmans (though independently of their suggestions), we may single out Maxwell and Majid’s Famine in Somalia (2016) and Albahari’s Crimes of peace (2015), both mentioned above.

Conclusion: progress in charity?

During the mid-twentieth century hiatus, noted above, between Mauss’s and Westermarck’s writings and the innovative contributions by Harrell-Bond, Alex de Waal, and Parry, one anthropologist was exceptional in taking a sustained interest in the theme of charity: R. R. Marett. He wrote: ‘real progress is progress in charity, all other advance being secondary thereto’ (Marett 1935: 40). He saw maternal nurturing as the fountainhead of charity (Marett 1939: 141, 147). Though his phrasing will strike readers today as sentimental, it might be seen as adumbrating Fortes on amity and Frans de Waal on oxytocin. Yet no reflection on charity can ignore the lurking presence of reciprocity, which always threatens the purity of the free gift. The Bhagavad Gita recognised the moral dilemma over two millennia ago.

Marett’s dictum about progress has resonance today, and it prompts questions as to what should be recognised as progress. Since the 1960s, an amorphous movement known as Corporate Social Responsibility may be seen as one modern variant of charity, and ethnographic attention has been given to its manifestations, for instance in South Africa (Rajak 2011) and Saudi Arabia (Derbal 2014: 146-53). Among more recent innovations deserving of study is the formation of commercial consultancy firms to advise young people who have inherited wealth on how best to become philanthropic donors.

In any case, what used to be condescended to as ‘applied anthropology’ seems to be gathering some strength within the discipline. There are many opportunities for anthropologists to build on previous work relating to charity in ways that are practically useful as well as theoretically sophisticated, at a time of unprecedented demands on voluntary giving and volunteering.

Notes

This entry makes some use of material already published by the author in three other overview articles: ‘Charity’ in Fassin, D. (ed.) 2012. A companion to moral anthropology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell); ‘Religion and humanitarianism’, in MacGinty, R. & J.H. Peterson (eds) 2015. The Routledge companion to humanitarian action (London: Routledge); ‘Humanitarianism as ideology and practice’ in Callan H. (ed.) forthcoming. The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of anthropology. Gratitude is due to all these editors for the opportunities they have given for reflection. The present article owes much to Felix Stein as commissioning editor, and to two anonymous referees. Expert copy-editing was provided by Rebecca Tishler.

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Note on contributor

Jonathan Benthall is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, and Director Emeritus, Royal Anthropological Institute. His most recently published book is Islamic charities and Islamic humanism in troubled times (2016).

Jonathan Benthall, Downingbury Farmhouse, Pembury, Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN2 4AD, United Kingdom. jonathanbenthall@hotmail.com