Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Capitalism

Anti-Blackness

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 01:11:24 +0000

Anti Ku Klux Klan protesters marched in Philadelphia on 5 November, 1988, after white supremacist groups agreed to call off a rally that would have been held the same day. Picture by Lori Schaull

Sebastian Jackson

University of Virginia

Initially published 4 Dec 2025

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

Abstract:

‘Anti-Blackness’ refers to a pervasive and deeply entrenched form of dehumanisation and exclusion targeting people racialised as ‘Black’, particularly those of African, Afro-diasporic, and Australasian descent. While often categorised under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, some scholars argue that anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation rooted in the histories of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonial domination. Globally, it manifests in structural inequalities and in the everyday experiences of communities shaped by the afterlives of slavery.

Anthropology has historically been complicit in producing and legitimising anti-Black ideologies—constructing Blackness as inferior or subhuman while centring a fictive white ideal. Yet, anti-racist anthropologists have long challenged these paradigms, exposing their role in sustaining racial hierarchies. Today, anti-Blackness continues to shape disparities in healthcare, housing, education, incarceration, and cultural representation. At the same time, anthropology’s theories and methods—especially ethnography—offer tools to document, analyse, and challenge anti-Blackness in everyday life. This entry traces the discipline’s entanglement with anti-Blackness, emphasising both its role in reinforcing racial domination and its potential as a critical site for resistance, repair, and reimagining justice.

Introduction

Anti-Blackness is a global structure of domination that positions Blackness as a threat, a problem, or a deficit. It operates through and encompasses a wide range of practices and systems—including violence, exclusion, exploitation, and neglect—that have targeted people of African and Australasian descent across time and place. Though often discussed under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation: it has been foundational to the development of colonial empires, modern capitalism, and liberal democratic institutions (Wilderson 2010; Vargas 2018; Allen and Jobson 2016). Anti-Blackness shapes policing practices, incarceration, and economic deprivation, but also standards of beauty, moral hierarchies, and social relations in everyday life. From the commodification of enslaved people to the surveillance of Black life, anti-Blackness remains central to the organisation of the modern world.

Anthropology has played a contradictory role in relation to anti-Blackness. As a discipline, it has contributed to racial classification, legitimised colonial domination, and excluded Black scholars from its intellectual traditions (Harrison 1992; Mullings 2005). Yet anthropology’s core methods—especially participant observation and ethnographic attention to lived experience—also offer tools for understanding how anti-Black structures are produced, contested, and navigated in everyday life. This entry explores that tension. It traces how anthropology has both reinforced and challenged anti-Black ideas, drawing from Black feminist theory, critical race studies, and decolonial ethnography to highlight how Black communities generate practices of endurance, resistance, care, and worldmaking.

Within white supremacist thought, African and Australasian Blackness has long symbolised radical alterity—a condition imagined as incompatible with civilisation, reason, or beauty (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Smedley 1993). In this racial schema, Black people were often cast as subhuman, or as existing outside the category of the human altogether (Douglass 1854; Fanon 1952; Jung and Vargas 2021; Weheliye 2014; Wilderson 2020). These ideas were not merely ideological—they were embedded in laws, institutions, languages, and cultural norms around the world (Hall 1997; Morgan 2002; Spears 2021).^[1]

Consider, for example, Jim Crow segregation laws in the United States. This body of legislation, introduced between roughly 1877 and 1967 and predominantly across the US South, restricted the access of Black Americans to all major institutions of public life. It disenfranchised Black people politically, limited their economic possibilities, reduced their access to education, and supported a climate of anti-Black terror sustained by state officials and white militias. Anthropologists have argued that, under these laws,‘“Blackness” is the master-symbol of derogation in the society, and the “typical” Negro characteristics of dark skin color and of woolly or kinky hair are considered badges of subordinate status (Davis et al. [1941] 2022, 16). Such forms of anti-Blackness continue to shape institutions, economies, hierarchies, languages, desires, and intimacies in everyday life, even today.

This entry examines anti-Blackness in historical and contemporary perspective, showing how anthropologists and ethnographers have both enabled and challenged the racial orders that sustain white supremacy (Mullings 2005a; Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Pierre 2020). Contemporary anthropologists draw on the Black radical tradition and interdisciplinary literatures on Black ontology (i.e. the study of what it means to exist as a Black person) and Afropessimism (i.e. the study of fundamental structural aspects of society that perpetuate anti-Black racism) to examine how anti-Black violence and stigma organise modern life and death (Fanon 1952; Sexton 2008; Vargas 2018; Wilderson 2020). While the social construction of race has been examined across disciplines, anthropology’s ethnographic methods allow for sustained attention to how anti-Blackness is lived, embodied, and resisted in everyday life.

Slavery and anti-Blackness

Slavery was not always synonymous with Blackness (Patterson 1983; Smedley 1998; West 2002). In antiquity and the medieval period, Blackness was often associated with symbolic or spiritual meaning, rather than biological inferiority. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described Ethiopians as beautiful and noble; the fourteenth century Maghrebi intellectual Ibn Battuta praised the justice of West African Muslims; and medieval Europe venerated Black saints such as the Egyptian St. Maurice and the Black Madonna (Bindman and Gates 2010; Snowden 1970). Even when Blackness carried negative connotations, it was not yet biologically overdetermined and pathologised. The association of Blackness with heritable enslavement developed gradually through European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, as slavery became racialised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Smedley 1998; Gates and Curran 2022).

By the nineteenth century, after centuries of institutionalised chattel slavery, i.e. a form of slavery where slaves are considered to be the ‘property’ of their ‘owners’, Blackness had become a symbol of perpetual bondage and degradation. To be Black in most Euro-colonial societies meant being marked by ‘social death’—alienated from kin, honour, history, and futurity (Patterson 1983; Trouillot 1995; Wilderson 2020). Early anthropologists and ethnologists—especially those associated with the ‘American School’, led by Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and Louis Agassiz—helped naturalise this association by grounding it in pseudoscientific theories of racial difference, transforming a historically contingent condition into an allegedly immutable ‘truth’ (Gould 1981; Painter 2010; Smedley 1993).

In the wake of slavery, Black life continues to be evaluated through a white supremacist gaze—simultaneously feared and exploited, always in relation to its utility for colonial-capitalist accumulation (Du Bois 1903; Robinson 1983; Sharpe 2016). This was the case in the late nineteenth century when recently freed American slaves and their offspring were kept in highly exploitative working conditions, constituting ‘a segregated and servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges’ (Du Bois 1935, 32). It continued in the twentieth century, when Black Americans served as a capitalist underclass both in the American industrial and service economies, but also in the privatised for-profit prison economy that relies disproportionately on Black labour (Gibson-Light 2023; Oshinsky 1996). And it persists today, as Black lives around the world continue to be considered largely disposable, whether they are Haitian emigrants seeking a better life or disadvantaged Black children in the favelas of Brazil being subjected to police abuse (Joseph and Louis 2022; Smith 2016). Anti-Blackness developed as a system of racial domination shaped by intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity—privileging whiteness, and especially white men, above all (Baldwin and Mead 1971; Mullings 2005a; Shange 2019).

In the post-slavery world, Black bodies were recast as a ‘social problem’, requiring political and scientific intervention (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1898, 1903; Harrison 1992). In the US, this became the so-called ‘negro problem’; in the British Empire, the ‘native problem’. Both framed Black and Indigenous populations as inherently disorderly and unfit for self-rule—justifying ongoing racial domination. Anthropology was complicit in this global racial order. Emerging alongside imperial conquest, it helped classify, study, and govern the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ subject (Baker 1998; Blakey 2010; Smedley 1998; Trouillot 1991). As Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed, ‘the savage was the alter ego the West constructed for itself… the raison d’être of anthropology’ (1991, 28, 40).

Yet anthropology also became a space for critique and resistance. Black, Indigenous, and other minoritised scholars have used ethnographic tools to expose structures of racial domination and articulate alternative visions for humanity (Mullings 2005a; Harrison et al. 2018). Understanding anti-Blackness through anthropological and historical frameworks is vital to building an anti-racist, abolitionist, and decolonial anthropology (Bolles 2001; Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001; Perry 2016).

Anti-Blackness and the colonial foundations of anthropology

To understand contemporary expressions of anti-Blackness, we must first trace its genealogy through European ‘Enlightenment’ thought. Central to Enlightenment philosophy was the presumption that Black and Indigenous peoples existed ‘without history’, outside the temporal and moral horizons of Western modernity (Fabian 1983; Fanon 1952; Hegel 1894; Trouillot 1995; West 2002; Wolf 1982). Racial difference was increasingly cast not only in cultural or religious terms but as a biological fact, justifying colonial conquest as a civilising mission. Anthropological knowledge, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became an instrument for racial surveillance and control. Black and Indigenous bodies were rendered as objects of study, classification, and debate, often in the service of slavery, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and genocide. Thus, anthropology helped to uphold the normative distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ people and situated it along the colour line. In its studies of Black and Indigenous people, anthropology all too often ignored white rule and allowed anthropologists to serve as diplomats and public relations experts for white rule (Willis 1972; see also Baker 1998; Anderson 2019).

The modern scientific racism to which early anthropology contributed emerged alongside Enlightenment rationalism. Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae (10th ed., 1758) classified humans into continentally-bounded ‘varieties’. He described Africans as ‘Black, phlegmatic, lazy… sly, sluggish, neglectful’, and contrasted them with idealised Europeans, ‘governed by rites’. Relying on dubious colonial travel accounts, Linnaeus also claimed African women had ‘elongated labia’ and ‘breasts lactating profusely’.^[2]These dehumanising descriptors shaped later anatomical and racial science, grounding anti-Blackness in the language of empirical objectivity and universal classification (West 2002; Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

European theories of Black inferiority found fertile ground in the antebellum (1815-1861) United States. Thomas Jefferson—Founding Father, slaveholder, and third US president—substantially shaped American racial thought. In Notes on the state of Virginia (1781), he notoriously speculated: ‘I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks… are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind’ (222). This conjecture framed racial hierarchy as reasoned observation rather than prejudice, lending intellectual legitimacy to chattel slavery and segregation (Walker 1830; Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014).^[3] Jefferson’s views were not merely abstract. He enslaved over 700 people and exploited the reproductive capacities of African-descended women. His long-term relationship with Sally Hemings—an enslaved woman of mixed ancestry—produced several children, all of whom inherited enslaved status through their mother (Cohen 1969; Woodson 1918; Finkelman 2014).^[4] This dynamic of sexual domination, denial of paternity, and commodification of Black life exemplified the intimate operations of anti-Blackness at the heart of American democracy.

Jefferson’s influence extended beyond the Monticello plantation in Virginia, which he owned, and even beyond the plantation system that dominated the economic development of the American South from the seventeenth until the twentieth century. As president, he severed trade relations with the newly independent Black republic of Haiti, fearing its revolutionary example would inspire slave uprisings across the Americas, and especially in the US South (James 1938; Scott 2004, 2014; Trouillot 1995). His statesmanship and racist writings laid the groundwork for the so-called ‘American School of Anthropology’ which codified pseudo-scientific racial theories and enshrined anti-Blackness in American science, law, and education (Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014, 198).

While Jefferson laid the ideological foundation, the ‘American School’ formalised these ideas. Central was ‘polygenism’—the theory that racial groups like ‘Negroes’ and ‘Caucasians’ were biologically distinct species with immutable traits (Gould 1981; Keel 2013; Painter 2010). Polygenists claimed that Black people were naturally inferior and biologically suited for subjugation. Samuel G. Morton, often called the ‘father’ of American physical anthropology, used manipulated skull measurements to ‘prove’ that Africans ranked lowest in the human hierarchy (Stocking 1968; Smedley 1993; Blakey 2020). These claims helped justify slavery and segregation as the natural order (Morton 1839; Ralph 2012).

Closely linked was the theory of ‘hybrid sterility’, which pathologised racial mixing, and popularised the belief that ‘mulattoes’ were biologically unfit hybrids (Nott 1843). For example, an 1843 article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, claimed: ‘[T]he mulattoes are intermediate in intelligence between whites and blacks… they are less capable of endurance and are shorter lived… the women are bad breeders and bad nurses… the two sexes when they intermarry are less prolific’ (Nott 1843, 29–30). From such claims, it was concluded that interracial reproduction should be prohibited. These arguments later informed eugenics (i.e. ideas about improving the biological makeup of humans through selective breeding) and anti-miscegenation laws, embedding anti-Blackness in US legal and scientific infrastructure (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Nobles 2000; Pascoe 2010).

Yet these theories were never uncontested. Black intellectuals like Frederick Douglass (1854; 1881) and Anténor Firmin (1885) repudiated scientific racism and established and defended the rights of Black people. Rather than accept white supremacist race science, they argued that differences among racialised groups stemmed from historical and environmental conditions—not biology (Allen and Jobson 2016; Drake and Baber 1990; Fleuhr-Lobban 2000). Similarly, theories of polygenism and hybrid sterility were attacked as fallacious by noted scholars who condemned white anthropologists for being ‘blinded by passion’ and relying on false ‘audacious paradoxes’ (Firmin 1885, 68). Against the myth of hybrid sterility, Firmin wrote: ‘The fecundity of mulattoes is a fact so well known… that one can only be surprised that a scientist… can question it’ (68). Despite these rebuttals, obsession with Black bodies and racial mixture continued to dominate anthropological debates into the twentieth century (Anderson 2019; Baker 2020). Nevertheless, the early vindicationists, as they were known, laid foundations for an anti-racist and decolonial anthropology—one that exposed race science as spurious ideology serving domination.

Although polygenism lost credibility by the late nineteenth century, Darwinian evolutionary theories did not end scientific racism. Racial hierarchies were rearticulated through social Darwinism and eugenics (Stocking 1968; Gould 1981; Dennis 1995). Darwin’s theory of common ancestry debunked polygenism but recast human difference as evolutionary hierarchy. In The descent of man, Charles Darwin wrote:

At some future period… the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races… The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider… between man in a more civilized state… and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [Aboriginal] and the gorilla (1871, 156).

Such comparisons gave scientific credence to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous tropes, framing colonial violence as evolutionary progress. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer used these ideas to justify imperialism and capitalist inequality as inevitable (Dennis 1995; Magubane 2003). The rise of eugenics, a term and theory coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, reinforced this logic. Eugenicists envisioned humanity as a grand evolutionary tree, with elite Europeans at the top and Black and Indigenous peoples as stunted lower branches. These arboreal metaphors ‘naturalised’ racial hierarchies in society (Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

In Europe, anthropologists also illustrated ‘morphological’, ‘aesthetic’, and ‘intellectual’ trees to represent and legitimise these imagined racial hierarchies (Mantegazza 1881; see Fig 1). In these hierarchies, ‘Hottentots’, ‘Bushmen’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Caffres’, ‘Papuans’, ‘Australians’, and ‘Negritos’ are placed at the bottom, and ‘Aryans’—white Europeans—at the top (Taylor and Marino 2019, 116–7). In short, social Darwinism replaced polygenism but not racism—it simply gave anti-Blackness new scientific language.

racist_tree_diagram.png

(Fig 1). Paulo Mantegazza’s “Morphological, aesthetic, and intellectual hierarchies of the human race.” (1881).

The Black body

Building on the racial typologies of polygenism and the biological determinism of social Darwinism, physical anthropologists and early social scientists increasingly turned their attention to the Black body as an object of empirical study and political concern. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Black body became a central site through which scientific racism was naturalised and institutionalised. Rather than treating race solely as a taxonomic abstraction, anthropologists and state officials began to treat the bodies of Black people as repositories of deviance—biological, moral, and civilisational (Baker 1998). These discourses were not merely academic; they helped legitimise the structural realities of post-emancipation Black life, including structural poverty, segregation, political exclusion, and the ever-present threat of rebellion. Within this context, the Black body was framed not just as different, but as existentially dangerous—a problem to be studied, managed, and contained.

In post-Emancipation America (1865–1955), this racialised scrutiny took the form of what policymakers and social scientists called the ‘negro problem’ (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1903; 1935). The presence of millions of recently emancipated people in a supposedly democratic society raised an urgent socio-political question: What to do with the Blacks? Integration? Segregation? Expulsion to Africa? In response, segregationist laws known as ‘Black codes’, Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, and the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan’s terrorism reinforced racial domination through legal, social, and extra-legal means—perpetuating exclusion from education, labour, property, and political life (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Du Bois 1935; Woodward 1955).

The so-called ‘negro problem’ was thus a cultural trope shaped by deep-rooted ‘negrophobia’—the psychic and social condition in which Black bodies become projections of white fear, guilt, and fantasy, and the enduring legacies of slavery and settler colonialism (Butler 1993; Du Bois 1903; Fanon 1952; Ralph and Chance 2014). Black bodies became overdetermined by contradictory myths and stereotypes: biologically inferior yet physically threatening, hypersexual yet degenerate, human yet animal. They were objectified as specimens for medical and anthropological study and symbolically constructed as social threats to white civility and national order. As Frantz Fanon (1952) and Winthrop Jordan (1968) note, Black people were positioned somewhere between human and beast—feared, surveilled, and exploited.

American popular and scientific literatures alike portrayed Black men as ‘savages’ with uncontrollable lust for white women (Baker 1998; Fanon 1952). The myth of the Black rapist served to justify lynchings and other extrajudicial forms of racial terror (Wells 1909; Davis 1981). The Black male body was pathologised as criminal, immoral, and uncivilised (Muhammad 2010). These narratives were reinforced by legal mechanisms such as ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws, which limited Black people’s rights to get married, the ‘one-drop rule’, which asserted that anyone with a Black ancestor should also be racialised as Black, and the criminalisation of poverty through vagrancy and loitering statutes—all of which enabled the de facto re-enslavement of Black people through the convict leasing system, through which prisons could lease the forced labour of mostly Black prisoners to wealthy individuals and corporations (Blackmon 2008; Oshinsky 1996).

The trope of the Black criminal normalised systemic anti-Blackness and legitimated mass incarceration as a form of racial governance (Jordan 2014; Muhammad 2010). Structural racism, predicated on anti-Blackness, displaced responsibility for Black suffering onto Black people themselves. Structural racism refers to the ways that institutions, policies, and social arrangements collectively produce and reproduce racial inequality. Eugenicists, for example, used demographic data on Black mortality to predict the supposed ‘extinction of the Negro’ by the twentieth century (Brandt 1978; Ralph 2012; Muhammad 2010). These morbid fantasies ignored the systemic conditions of racialised death and pathologised Black existence that persist until today (Dennis 1995; Mbembe 2019). For example, young Black and Latinx men in East Harlem, confronting systemic unemployment, are made to navigate illicit economies —such as the street-level drug trade and other informal survival strategies that emerge in response to exclusion from the formal labor market—while their bodies are surveilled, punished, or absorbed into carceral systems designed for profit maximization (Bourgois 2003).

The commodification of Black bodies has long underwritten the global capitalist economy, from the extraction of labour under slavery to contemporary racialised markets in entertainment, sports, surveillance, and incarceration. Numerous ethnographic studies have examined how Black bodies are treated as fungible assets—valued for their productivity, aesthetic, or capacity for violence, yet systematically devalued as persons. In the US, for instance, Black bodies are hyper-visible in popular media yet constrained by controlling images that reflect and reproduce racial hierarchies (Gray 1995; Jackson Jr. 2005). In popular culture, recurring stereotypes such as the ‘mammy’—the loyal, self-sacrificing domestic servant—and the ‘welfare queen’—depicted as lazy, hyper-fertile, and parasitic—serve to naturalise Black women's social subordination and rationalise structural inequality through familiar visual tropes (Collins 2000).

Even in the American healthcare system, Black patients are often treated as less-than-human within clinical settings, where capitalist logics and anti-Black racism intersect to devalue Black patients’ pain, experiences, and lives (Rouse 2009). These racialised medical encounters are shaped by ‘ethical variability’, whereby clinicians justify unequal care by invoking culturally biased notions of responsibility, credibility, and worthiness.

Afrophobia

‘Afrophobia’ refers to a deep-seated hatred and fear of anything associated with Blackness or Africanness. The concept is closely related to ‘negrophobia’, both emerging from long-standing European traditions of imagining African peoples as inferior, dangerous, disorderly, or contaminating. Its discursive roots trace to Greco-Roman and medieval European portrayals of Africans as monstrous and uncivilised (Stewart 2005, 43; Cantave 2024, 863). In the modern world, Afrophobia encompasses not only aesthetic prejudice but also a globalised fear of African peoples, cultural traditions, and their capacity to unsettle white supremacy and Euro-American hegemony. In Latin America, this manifests in the stigmatisation and criminalisation of African-derived spiritual traditions such as Santería in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and Haitian Vodou (Beliso-De Jesús 2015). These traditions—born in the crucible of slavery and colonial violence—are not simply forms of worship but cultural systems of Black survival, resistance, and world-making (Boaz 2021; Stewart 2005; Cantave 2024).

Historically, anthropology was complicit in shaping Afrophobic knowledge regimes. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographers often depicted African spiritual practices as primitive ‘superstitions’, aligning with colonial regimes that sought to eradicate them. Classic ethnographies in French and Iberian colonies portrayed Vodou and Candomblé as irrational or pathological—reinforcing racist state policies. Early anthropological writing rarely took these belief systems seriously as coherent cosmologies, instead treating them as exotic curiosities or proof of Black primitivism (Brown 2003).

Yet anthropology has also helped challenge these frameworks. Contemporary Afro-diasporic ethnographers and critical anthropologists have reclaimed the study of African-derived religions as a site of political and epistemological contestation. In this vein, scholars have foregrounded how practitioners understand their own rituals as ethical, affective, and intellectual forms of life-making. They also show how gender, sexuality, and embodiment are transformed through spiritual practice (Pérez 2016; Daniel 2005; Tinsley 2008).

In the Dominican Republic, Afrophobia is materially enacted in everyday life—especially through racialised anxieties about beauty, hygiene, and spiritual purity (Candelario 2007). Dominican beauty salons serve as intimate spaces where Afro-Haitian features and aesthetics are policed and effaced. Here, Haitian migrants are stigmatised not only for their Blackness but for presumed associations with Vodou, often framed publicly as satanic or uncivilised. These anxieties are entangled with fears of national degeneration and cultural contamination. Ethnographic observations such as these show how the body becomes a moral frontier where race, nation, and spirit converge—and where Afrophobic violence is inscribed onto skin, hair, and comportment.

In this context, anthropological studies that centre the lived experiences of Afro-religious practitioners offer critical tools to decolonise knowledge and confront Afrophobia. They reveal African diasporic religions not as threats to national order but as vital repositories of historical memory, resilience, and political possibility. At their best, ethnographic methods can expose the micro-practices of racial domination while amplifying Black cultural life on its own terms.

Misogynoir and Black feminist anthropology

‘Misogynoir’ refers to the specific forms of violence and dehumanisation that Black women experience at the intersection of anti-Black racism and misogyny (Bailey 2021). Historically, Black women’s bodies were subjected to scientific, sexual, and symbolic violation. A paradigmatic example is Saartjie Baartman (c.1789–1815), a Khoi woman from South Africa exhibited in nineteenth-century Europe as the ‘Hottentot Venus’ (Gilman 1985; Magubane 2001; Strother 1999). Her semi-nude body was displayed to curious European audiences, and after her death, her remains were dissected by French anatomist Georges Cuvier and exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1974. Baartman’s treatment exemplified how the Black female body was racialised, sexualised, and rendered a scientific object—central to the development of comparative anatomy and early anthropological inquiry.

Contemporary Black feminist anthropologists have shown how this colonial gaze continues to shape representations of Black women. They point out that Black women’s bodies have historically been ‘disciplined’ through contradictory social discourses—from Christian morality and motherhood to racist stereotypes of hypersexuality and labour, and that white and Black women are constructed in opposition to each other: white women as symbols of domestic virtue and Black women as oversexualised ‘workhorses’ (Shaw 2001). Consequently, Black women in postcolonial Zimbabwe, as well as the post–civil rights era in the United States, navigate persistent gendered-racial expectations, often by asserting alternative moral, religious, and familial frameworks to reclaim bodily autonomy and dignity (Shaw 2001).

Other ethnographic studies also reveal the complex ways Black women resist, negotiate, or internalise these intersecting oppressions. For instance, Afro-Caribbean girls in New York are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in public space—fetishised as style icons and simultaneously policed as disruptive. Their creative expressions through fashion, music, and dance are often criminalised, yet also serve as strategies of survival and identity (LaBennett 2011). Similarly, young Black women in a transitional housing shelter in Detroit use performance and expressive culture to resist the stigmatisation of Black girlhood (Cox 2015). These ethnographies illuminate the lived experience of misogynoir and demonstrate how Black women mobilise care, kinship, and creativity in the face of structural violence.

Importantly, Black feminist scholars have also highlighted the intra-racial dimensions of misogyny. Black women are often expected to subordinate their experiences of gendered violence to broader racial struggles, leading to silences around the harm they endure from Black men (Collins 2000; Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 2014; Davis 1981; Lorde 1984). Anthropologists have argued that ethnography is particularly well-suited to expose these overlapping systems of oppression by attending to the quotidian textures of abuse, labour, survival, and joy in Black women’s lives (Mullings 2005b; McClaurin 2001). Black feminist anthropologists aim to make Black women’s lives ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21), a political and methodological project that resists both invisibility as well as hyper-surveillance. Gertrude Fraser’s (1998) ethnographic research on Black midwifery and the racial politics of reproductive health exemplifies this approach. She shows how Black women’s bodies and labour are routinely devalued in clinical and institutional settings. Attending to the embodied and generational knowledge of Black women healthcare workers illuminates how racism, sexism, and professional hierarchies intersect to marginalise Black women’s authority and care work. By centring Black women’s voices, labour, and intellectual production, Black feminist anthropology challenges the discipline to reckon with its own racial and gendered hierarchies—and to imagine new possibilities for more ethical, inclusive, and liberatory knowledge-making (McClaurin 2001). Yet, despite these contributions, Black women anthropologists have historically been marginalised within the academy. Their scholarship remains under-cited and undervalued in disciplinary canons (Harrison et al. 2018; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic exclusion reflects broader patterns of anti-Blackness and sexism that pervade the discipline of anthropology itself.

Racial capitalism

‘Racial capitalism’ refers to the process by which capitalist economies have always been structured by and dependent upon racial hierarchies and the exploitation of Black labour. First developed by Cedric Robinson (1983), the concept critiques the idea that capitalism is a racially neutral economic system only later corrupted by racism. Robinson argues that capitalism emerged from European feudal orders that already encoded racial difference, and that Black people have been subjected to a distinct form of economic subjugation central to the global capitalist order. In this view, anti-Blackness is not a by-product of capitalism but foundational to its formation and endurance (Du Bois 1935; Williams 1940; Robinson 1983; Matlon 2016).

Anthropologists have documented how Black life is shaped by systems of racialised accumulation and dispossession, from plantation slavery to contemporary neoliberalism. Insurance policies on enslaved Africans in the nineteenth century US South illustrate the fusion of racial logics and financial speculation (Ralph 2012). Enslaved people were rendered fungible labour and abstract instruments of credit and actuarial calculation. Their value derived not from their humanity but from their capacity to generate returns for owners and insurers. Slave insurance reveals how Black life was financialised in ways that shaped modern capitalism, including the development of life insurance, risk management, and governance of future value.

Historian Destin Jenkins (2021) builds on this understanding with a historical analysis of how municipal debt became a tool of racial governance in twentieth century San Francisco—a framework that offers important insights for anthropological approaches to racial capitalism. Drawing on archival research, Jenkins shows how bond markets and credit-rating agencies influenced public infrastructure decisions, disinvesting from Black neighbourhoods while underwriting white wealth accumulation. Racial capitalism thus operates not only through exploitation but through financial infrastructures that dictate whose futures are investable.

In the Caribbean, economic policies associated with globalisation, tourism, and austerity have likewise entrenched anti-Black hierarchies (Slocun 2006; Thomas 2019, 2021). In urban Jamaica, Black youth are simultaneously criminalised and commodified—as symbols of urban danger for tourists and as security laborers in the very industries that exclude them. In this way, Blackness is linked to economic disposability while also being monetised within global security regimes (Jaffe 2015).

Similarly, labour struggles in Guadeloupe are shaped by colonial legacies and racialised inequality, as Black workers mobilise both class and race to challenge French imperial domination (Bonilla 2021). Ethnographic research with rural St. Lucian women in the banana export industry also reveals the racialised and gendered dimensions of global capitalism (Slocum 2006). Here, Black women navigate the intersecting pressures of neoliberal trade regimes, postcolonial marginalisation, and local class hierarchies, and underscore how global capitalism reproduces racial and gendered inequalities. For example, many women farmers must absorb the risks of volatile export prices, perform the unpaid labour required to meet stringent quality standards, and contend with male intermediaries who control access to markets and resources, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable within global commodity chains.

Anthropologists working in the tradition of structural violence—a concept popularised by Paul Farmer (2004)—have shown how racialised violence is embedded in political and economic systems, not just individual attitudes. Structural violence refers to the historically produced social arrangements—such as poverty, segregation, and unequal access to healthcare—that systematically harm marginalised populations by constraining their life chances and exposing them to preventable suffering. While structural racism is a specific form of this violence, rooted in racial hierarchy and anti-Blackness, structural violence more broadly encompasses the multiple social forces that produce patterns of inequality and harm. Farmer’s work in Haiti traced how colonialism and neoliberalism shape health outcomes through institutional neglect and economic exploitation. Building on this, Adia Benton’s (2015) ethnography of Sierra Leone’s HIV response reveals how global health regimes reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies, exposing whose lives are deemed valuable or not.

The Harlem Birth Right Project, led by Leith Mullings (2001; 2005b), further developed this approach in the US context, analysing how race, gender, and class intersect to produce structural vulnerability. Their research linked high rates of infant mortality among Black women in Harlem to housing insecurity, over-policing, and barriers to quality prenatal care. Other ethnographers have likewise shown how structural racism is embodied through cyclical poverty, over-policing, and healthcare inequality (Bourgois 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Together, these studies reveal how anti-Blackness is infrastructural—woven into the built environment, labour markets, and social services—and how racial capitalism renders Black life both exploitable and expendable.

‘Colour-blindness’ and colourism

Anti-Blackness is a fact of everyday life across the postcolonial world (Fanon 1952; Essed and Goldberg 2002; Keaton 2023). Yet for much of the twentieth century, anthropology’s ability to study racism seriously was constrained by post-Boasian liberalism and its doctrinal commitments to anti-essentialism and ‘colour-blindness’ (Allen and Jobson 2016; Anderson 2019; Baker 1998; Mullings 2005a; Shanklin 1998). These liberal frameworks, dominant since the 1960s, often dismissed structural racism as a serious object of anthropological inquiry. As scholars have argued, late twentieth-century racial ideologies increasingly took the form of ‘colour-blind racism’ or ‘racism without races’—systems of inequality that deny the significance of race while reproducing its effects through ostensibly race-neutral institutions, discourses, and practices (Bangstad and Fuentes 2023; Bonilla-Silva 2015; Omi and Winant 1986). With the rise of Black Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and the inclusion of more Black and Indigenous anthropologists, critical ethnographic research has increasingly foregrounded the structures and lived conditions of anti-Blackness—reshaping academic knowledge and the local-global politics of race.

Contemporary anthropology is especially well positioned to examine the overlapping and divergent manifestations of anti-Blackness worldwide. While unified by a global racialised formation, the expressions of anti-Blackness in Ghana, Brazil, the US, Haiti, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Europe vary significantly, shaped by distinct colonial histories, nationalist projects, and local racial regimes (Jung and Vargas 2021, 2022; Mills 2021). Jamaica, for example, enjoys sovereignty without emancipation from US imperialism (Thomas 2019), while African Americans have experienced emancipation from slavery without sovereignty (Shange 2019, 8). These divergent trajectories shape distinct yet interconnected experiences of anti-Blackness which emerge from the afterlives of empire, revealing how racial domination is reproduced across multiple global sites (Thomas and Clarke 2013).

Anti-Blackness manifests through surveillance, discipline, and the differential valuation of Black life. Black people are routinely seen as threatening, unruly, or out of place (Browne 2015; Butler 1993; Sharpe 2016). These racialised perceptions give rise to punitive structures—both spectacular and mundane—that discipline Black bodies. In eighteenth century New York, for instance, Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race individuals were legally required to carry lanterns after dark to illuminate their faces (Browne 2015). Today, such logics persist in policing, education, and carceral systems. For example, in her study of a San Francisco school, Savannah Shange (2019) describes how Black and Latinx youth are disciplined through ‘carceral progressivism’, i.e. the use of multicultural rhetoric that claims to lament structural racism, but still insists on zero-tolerance and police-based approaches to disciplining Black people and justify racial control. In Australia, Aboriginal youth are incarcerated at 20 times the rate of their white peers, revealing how settler colonialism continues to target Black and Indigenous life under the banner of multiculturalism (Holland et al. 2024; Hage 2000; Povinelli 2002; Wolfe 2016).

Ethnographies in the Caribbean and Latin America show how anti-Blackness animates postcolonial statecraft and global capitalism. In Jamaica, American militarism and neoliberalism have shaped violent policing regimes (Thomas 2019) while in Brazil, anthropologists have documented how militarised policing specifically targets Black favelas (Alves 2018; Smith 2016; Gillam 2022). Perhaps the most striking example comes from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a place that is marketed as an ‘Afro-paradise’—a transnational fantasy that celebrates Afro-Brazilian culture for tourism and national identity—even as the state continues to subject Black communities to pervasive violence and surveillance. Indeed, Black communities have long been sites of routinised, yet spectacular, racialised violence (Smith 2016). Here, Afro-Brazilians resist anti-Blackness through protest and performance practices—particularly bloco afro processions, Carnival-based counter-performances, and community mobilisations against police violence—in everyday life.

In the US, Laurence Ralph (2020) shows how the Chicago Police Department systematised torture against Black men from the 1970s to 1990s. In Detroit, Aimee Cox (2016) details how unhoused Black girls choreograph strategic movements through hostile urban spaces to claim dignity and survival. These ‘choreographies’ are not only acts of endurance but also everyday refusals of disposability. Together, these ethnographies show that anti-Blackness is not limited to spectacular violence but is embedded in quotidian institutions that constrain and surveil Black life. Anthropology, when critically engaged, offers tools to document these dynamics and to amplify Black knowledge, resistance, and worldmaking.

‘Colourism’ is another important facet of anti-Blackness. It refers to prejudice and discrimination based on skin tone, often within Black and Brown communities (Glenn 2009; Jablonski 2021). Coined by Alice Walker (1983), ‘colourism’ names the global preference for lighter skin in proximity to whiteness (Bajwa et al. 2023). People experience it daily: in family life, dating, beauty, housing, healthcare, education, media, and policing (Caldwell 2007; Anekwe 2014; Monk 2015; Spears 2020). Though the term is modern, colourism is centuries old, shaped by slavery, colonialism, and racial science. In colonial Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), French jurist Moreau de Saint-Méry (1796) identified eleven gradations of racial mixture, praising the ‘mulatto’ as the ideal hybrid. He wrote:

Of all the combination of white and nègre it is the mulatto who brings together all of the physical advantages; of all of these crossings of race he is the one who has the strongest constitution, the most appropriate to Saint-Domingue's climate. To the sobriety and the strength of the nègre he joins the physical grace and the intelligence of the white (1798; Garrigus 2006).

Such fantasies fused early scientific racism with erotic desire, projecting European superiority onto the bodies of the enslaved. As many scholars have argued, early racial science was animated by anxieties over miscegenation, bodily purity, and racial control (Fanon 1954; Jordan 1968; Stoler 2002; Wolfe 2016). Moreover, ‘racially hierarchical social orders, which are rooted in the control and exploitation of (racially identified) peoples and places […] generate complex dynamics of hate and love, fear and fascination, contempt and admiration […] that seems to have a specifically sexual dimension’ (Wade 2009, 2).

Colourism is historically and geographically contingent. In the US, the ‘one-drop rule’ collapsed racial ambiguity into a rigid Black-white binary (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Jordan 2014). Yet lighter-skinned Black people—particularly women—have often been granted greater social capital and proximity to whiteness (Larsen 1929; Walker 1983). In South Africa, Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, ‘pigmentocracies’ used gradations of skin tone to structure social life (Bacelar da Silva 2022; Jackson 2024; Sheriff 2001; Telles 2014). Terms like ‘coloured’, ‘milat’, ‘mulato’, and ‘mestizo’ mark intermediate racial categories, creating buffer classes that were closer to whiteness but denied its full privileges (Glenn 2009). This stratification fostered internalised racism and horizontal antagonisms (Spears 2020; Walker 1983).

Ethnographic research shows that in Latin America, racial identities are often expressed through skin tone rather than fixed categories, and are shaped by context, class position, and local understandings of ancestry. As Peter Wade (2009) notes, racial classification in the region is fluid, relational, and embedded in broader national ideologies of mestizaje that link colour, class, and sexuality. In many settings, individuals may be identified differently depending on region, social status, or interpersonal interactions. In Mexico, descriptors like ‘moreno’ or ‘güero’ serve as racial signifiers that shift with context (Sue 2013). In Brazil, ideologies of ‘racial democracy’ have long obscured structural inequalities perpetuated by anti-Blackness and colourism (Hordge-Freeman 2015; Sheriff 2001; Twine 1998). In the Dominican Republic, anti-Haitianism reinforces the association of Blackness with cultural and national undesirability (Aber and Small 2013; Candelario 2007).

Skin bleaching is a global phenomenon, not confined to Black Atlantic societies. In India, the Philippines, South Korea, Peru, and Ghana, lighter skin is linked with beauty and modernity (Glenn 2009; Jha 2015; Mishra 2015; Pierre 2015). Many products contain mercury, hydroquinone, or potent topical steroids, causing severe dermatological damage—including chemical burns, skin thinning, and ochronosis—as well as systemic risks such as kidney failure, hypertension, and neurological toxicity. Despite these severe health risks, the global skin-lightening industry exceeds $8 billion annually and is expected to continue growing.

Colourism reveals that anti-Blackness cuts across national borders and ‘people of colour’ (‘POC’) categories. Although the term ‘POC’ is often mobilised to foster cross-ethnic alliances and highlight shared experiences of marginalisation, the term can also flatten important differences by subsuming distinct racial histories under a single label. In particular, it can obscure the structural and quotidian nature of anti-Blackness, diluting attention to the specific forms of violence, exclusion, and state surveillance directed at Black communities.

This points to the fact that anti-Blackness is not just a legacy of colonialism—it is a structuring logic of the modern racial order (Vargas 2018). Everyday manifestations of anti-Blackness, whether through skin tone, surveillance, or institutional neglect, underscore the systemic nature of racial violence. Anthropology, at its best, offers the methodological tools to document and disrupt these patterns.

Conclusion

Anthropology has long been complicit in the perpetuation of anti-Blackness and white supremacy, at times functioning as a tool of racial domination and colonial conquest (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Gupta and Stoolman 2021; Mullings 2005a). Yet anthropology also holds liberatory potential, precisely because it seeks to understand how social structures and relations, political hierarchies, and hegemonic cultures are experienced by people themselves (Harrison 1991; Cox et al. 2022; Mullings 2005a). By engaging with theories of anti-Blackness—especially those developed beyond the discipline—anthropology can interrogate its own historical complicity while contributing to contemporary Black freedom struggles worldwide.

The Movement for Black Lives—a global social movement against the ongoing structural devaluation of Black life and the resurgence of white nationalist politics—underscores the urgency of this task (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Jung and Vargas 2021; Williams 2015). From anti-police violence protests in the US to anti-racist demonstrations abroad, this movement highlights both the persistence of racial violence and the resilience of Black communities.^[5] Anthropological perspectives are essential here—not only to bear witness to how Black people experience and endure anti-Blackness, but also to illuminate how they resist and reimagine these structures in everyday life.

Black feminist anthropologists have long shown that centring Black humanity requires analysing intersecting oppressions and committing to politically engaged scholarship in Black communities themselves (Bolles 2001; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001). Despite this, Black women anthropologists have themselves been marginalised or excluded from the discipline’s canon, and their work remains undervalued (Harrison et al. 2018; McClaurin 2001; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic erasure not only marginalises scholars but also silences the communities they represent. It exposes how dominant notions of merit and rigor remain shaped by Eurocentric, anti-Black, and sexist assumptions (McClaurin 2001). In response, Black feminist anthropologists continue to counter this devaluation by making Black women’s lives and voices ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21).

Calls for abolitionist anthropology, informed by the Movement for Black Lives, remind us that the discipline must embrace more liberatory frameworks for representing human experience (Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991). Black practices of fugitivity, marronage—historically, the flight of enslaved people who formed autonomous communities in resistance to colonial domination—storytelling, witness-bearing, and radical ‘freedom dreams’ envision life beyond the ubiquitous ‘weather’ of anti-Blackness. These visions are grounded in the lived realities and cultural imaginaries of Black people (Allen and Jobson 2016; Kelley 2002; Sharpe 2016). To remain relevant to the critical study of the human condition, anthropology must treat anti-Blackness not as peripheral, but as foundational to understanding the modern world (Jung and Vargas 2021; Wilderson 2003). In this way, anthropology can not only interrogate its own colonial legacies, but also serve as a tool for amplifying the voices, experiences, and aspirations of Black communities globally, contributing to the broader struggle for racial justice.

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Note on contributor

Sebastian Jackson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies and Social Anthropology from Harvard University. His research examines race, intimacy, and the afterlives of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid in South Africa, the United States, and the broader Black Atlantic world. He has published on racism, white supremacist ideology, and postcolonial kinship in academic and public-facing venues.

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[5] 2020. “Vision for Black lives.” Movement for Black Lives. https://m4bl.org/v4bl/.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Outer space

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:54:32 +0000

Rocket launch at Playalinda Beach, Florida, 2017. Picture by Jill Bazeley

Anna Szolucha

Jagiellonian University

Initially published 26 Nov 2025

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

Abstract:

People’s daily lives have always relied heavily on their link with outer space. From using the constellations for navigation millennia ago to connecting with thousands of satellites that provide geopositioning, communication, and weather monitoring services, outer space has been a constant companion. But it doesn’t always appear as such in today’s world. Today, space exploration might seem distant and reserved for a select few—astronauts, billionaire tourists, astronomers, or the military. However, ethnographic work shows how deeply outer space is intertwined with people’s lives on Earth, from the daily work of space scientists to the impacts of space infrastructure on local communities around the world.

Since outer space cannot often be known directly, what humans know about it and how they relate to it tends to be shaped by what they know about and how they relate to Earth. Consequently, earthly relations and political dynamics inevitably influence human activities in space. At the same time, an anthropological perspective on outer space can help defamiliarise the taken-for-granted contexts and factors specific to the earthly realm, revealing how deeply they shape human lives and people’s understanding of Earth within the cosmos. Thus, examining outer space can help us recontextualise fundamental questions about society and culture, compelling us to expand our analytical framework to encompass the cosmic realm but also encouraging us to explore alternative models for social life on Earth and beyond. This entry showcases anthropological research that has attempted to answer three fundamental questions at the human-cosmos interface: How do people interact with outer space? How does outer space impact human lives? How does outer space influence our understanding of social reality?

Introduction

Outer space exerts a constant, albeit sometimes imperceptible or remote, influence on the daily lives of people worldwide. From treating the sky as the domain of ancestors and a guide for social and environmental understanding, to utilising space-based infrastructures and technologies for essential needs like communication and travel, outer space profoundly impacts human existence. Yet, what constitutes ‘outer space’? How have people interacted with this realm? And given its intimate connection to human life, is the term ‘outer’ space even appropriate?

The boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space remains ambiguous, conventionally placed between 80 and 100 kilometres above sea level. Anthropological studies generally avoid rigid definitions of outer space as a purely physical entity, recognising it instead as a domain of human sociality beyond Earth’s atmosphere where diverse political, social, economic, and cultural relations are being played out.

At the same time, media and political discourses often frame outer space within an expansionist, competitive, and developmental narrative, employing terms like ‘space colonisation’, ‘frontier’, ‘race’, and ‘settlement’. Some of these are also used in academic literature. International and national legislation governing space activities, such as the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, frequently reinforce the perception of space as an empty territory, available on a first-come, first-served basis. Some argue that the very descriptors ‘outer’ and ‘extraterrestrial’ perpetuate this sense of detachment, overlooking the long-standing Indigenous connections to the sky and the myriad ways in which it has shaped the lives of various communities and individuals throughout history, both before and after rockets soared through the atmosphere (see, for example, Bawaka Country et al. 2020). Certain critical scholars refer to outer space with the term ‘cosmos’, which usually carries a more philosophical or spiritual connotation than ‘outer space’. Within this entry, these terms are treated as synonymous. Doing so deliberately avoids reinforcing some of the dualisms—such as technology/culture or sacred/profane—that anthropological inquiry strives to critically examine and challenge.

Space anthropology is still an emerging field, despite its roots in early works by Ben Finney and Eric Jones (1986), among others. While it is already grappling with intricate terminological challenges and shifting research foci, its inquiries are fundamentally driven by a desire to ask better questions about humans and understand their place within the cosmos. Thus, ethnographic studies have investigated communities deeply immersed in outer space, such as space scientists discovering new planets by comparing their features to Earth and engineers working with Martian rovers that navigate an extraterrestrial terrain, for whom the cosmos is not merely an imagined realm but also a remote yet tangible and real place. These studies demonstrate that our understanding of the cosmos is not solely derived from an unmediated scientific perception, but rather shaped by a confluence of individual imaginations, organisational structures, and national cultural influences (Messeri 2016; Vertesi 2015).

As people’s familiarity with the vast cosmos deepens, it forces them to re-evaluate Earth’s position within it, broadening understandings of human environments and challenging anthropocentric and geocentric perspectives. At the same time, anthropological and historical research consistently underscores the persistent terrestrial impacts of space exploration, the ecological and social footprint of which extends beyond the celestial sphere. Launch sites, research facilities, and other infrastructure are firmly rooted on Earth. These structures are not merely stepping stones to the cosmos; anthropological research argues that they are also intricately intertwined with earthly realities of colonialism, environmental impacts, and social displacement (e.g. Redfield 2000, 212–44). Outer space thus emerges as an arena of political power struggles, military competition, and capitalist expansion, where approaches deemed historically problematic on Earth are apparently readily adopted for exploring the unknown. Despite the powerful forces that frame the cosmos as a domain for profit-making and geopolitical expansion, anthropological perspectives both provide nuance for and problematise these narratives.

As space exploration continues, anthropological analysis has also addressed the more speculative possibilities of encountering extraterrestrial cultures or establishing human habitats beyond Earth. Ethnographic knowledge of intercultural dialogue, encounters, and migrations once served as anthropologists’ claim to a rightful role in space exploration endeavours (Finney and Jones 1986). Today, some continue to envisage outer space as a potential new home for humanity where the limitations and shortcomings of current societies could be transcended (Valentine 2012). This opens up discussions about human futures, both on Earth and potentially beyond. Consequently, outer space emerges as a space for not only critiquing existing politico-economic relations but also for projecting and contemplating alternative social formations.

From an anthropological perspective, outer space can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of terrestrial realities. According to this approach, earthly relationships and dynamics play out and expand within a cosmic context, intricately connected to events on Earth. On the other hand, outer space can also be seen as an overarching realm that encompasses our planet. This perspective recontextualises Earth’s position and significance within the cosmos. It offers potential avenues for imagining alternative social and economic relations both on Earth and beyond. This entry delves into anthropological investigations exploring the profound relationship between humans and outer space. It examines three core questions that have shaped space anthropology so far. These are: How do humans engage with the cosmos? What is the impact of outer space on our lives? And what is its influence on people’s understanding of social reality?

How do people interact with outer space?

Ethnographic research has demonstrated a diverse range of ways in which people around the world engage with the cosmos. Their interactions shape their understanding of its significance within their communities and for humanity as a whole. While these understandings may sometimes differ, their analytical value lies in their capacity to offer alternative perspectives that can enrich, nuance, problematise, or challenge established narratives of space and space exploration. For example, Indigenous connections with the sky often problematise the assumption that outer space is empty and inanimate and no people or beings other than a limited number of astronauts have travelled or lived in space. Reportedly, Inuit peoples in Alaska laughed when an anthropologist informed them about the first Moon landing, as they claimed to have been travelling there for years (Young 1987).

In fact, several Indigenous knowledges express a profound interconnectedness between the earthly and cosmic realms, recognising their mutual dependence. The sky is often considered to be inhabited by ancestors and other beings. Indigenous cosmologies such as those of the Yolŋu in northern Australia are deeply embedded within the stories told about outer space and the sky (Bawaka Country et al. 2020). Moreover, oral traditions and Indigenous knowledge of the skies not only aid in understanding natural patterns related to weather, seasons, animal behaviour, and plant life but also sometimes pre-date Western scientific knowledge of historical celestial phenomena (Hamacher 2023). Given their close and kin relationships with the cosmos, Indigenous communities worldwide such as the Diné (the Navajo nation in the southwestern United States) often caution against exploitative approaches to space exploration, which they believe disrupt the cosmic order (Bartels 2024).

Non-Indigenous interactions with the cosmos can appear to lack the Indigenous sense of kinship with the sky. Space scientists and engineers within major Western space agencies and laboratories, recently the focus of ethnographic attention, often rely on technological devices and terrestrial landscapes to mediate their interactions with and conceptions of the cosmos. However, even they strive to reaffirm the reality of the cosmic objects they study and operate upon, seeking to establish more intimate and multi-layered relationships with outer space.

For instance, scientists who study planets that circle stars outside our solar system (exoplanets) strive to measure the dimming of a star while the exoplanet transits across its face—a technique known as ‘the transit method’. Subsequently, they visualise and interpret data obtained through such methods to turn the measurements into something that would seem more tangible and relatable. As part of this process, the scientists imagine exoplanets as potential places that they might inhabit, as worlds (Messeri 2016). They draw, for example, upon the more familiar language of the Earth’s solar system to describe the properties of newly discovered planets. Even though their precise parameters remain uncertain, astronomers employ familiar comparisons, calling the exoplanets ‘super-Earths’ or ‘hot Neptunes’, etc. They also utilise a variety of visualisation techniques, from producing curves and graphs to generating statistics, to represent these places that elude visual observation. Similarly, scientists can now translate cosmic phenomena, such as gravitational waves, into audible sounds. While this process relies on established scientific theories, models, and instrumental captures, the resulting sounds are also shaped by a multitude of social and cultural metaphors. For example, an astronomical observatory is compared to ‘a hearing aid’ and sounds of cosmic phenomena to ‘chirps’ or ‘whines’. These visual and acoustic ‘informalisms’ (Helmreich 2016) not only reflect upon the original theories and instrumental data but also foster a more intimate connection between the astronomer and the celestial objects they study.

This connection mirrors the direct experience of observing the night sky at an optical observatory. Although astronomical work increasingly relies on digital data, some astronomers still deeply value the opportunity to conduct research at an observatory, where the distant universe becomes more tangible (Hoeppe 2012). Ethnographic work within science and engineering teams responsible for operating Mars rovers has also underscored the importance of such embodied practices (Vertesi 2015). Various team members identified with the bodies of the rovers, incorporating their physical gestures and movements into their understanding of the rovers and their objects of analysis. This shows how important representational techniques are in establishing and cultivating relationships with the extraterrestrial. Simultaneously, team members aligned their work structures with local and workplace-based norms, meetings, and forms of talk, thereby forging a specific community. Put differently, the intimate engagements with the Mars rovers represented the extraterrestrial as well as contributing to the production and maintenance of a particular social order. People’s representations of and engagements with outer space not only facilitate the scientific exploration of the cosmos and render extraterrestrial scientific objects more legible, but also generate new social relations on Earth, aligning individuals’ aims and values in their collective endeavour to familiarise the unknown.

Many of the techniques that bring the cosmos closer and render it more familiar are inherently social and cultural. Consequently, our representations of outer space are profoundly shaped by cultural tropes and socio-political narratives. The spectacular images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, are not merely unfiltered photographs of the universe; they are products of scientific and aesthetic negotiation. Astronomers had to make deliberate choices about how to translate raw data into meaningful colours and contrasts. In the process, they drew upon familiar geological and meteorological formations, as well as the iconography of nineteenth century American Western landscapes (Kessler 2012). These images were carefully composed for both American domestic and international audiences, serving as a form of scientific outreach and public service. However, by drawing parallels to earthly landscapes and aligning with narratives of outer space as a frontier, these images also encouraged a specific perception of the cosmos: a place simultaneously distant yet inviting exploration. Similar dynamics are evident in other public-facing initiatives, even those designed to be more ‘democratic’, i.e. open to independent public interpretation. For instance, a group of computer scientists at NASA aimed to create an interactive map of Mars that the public could explore independently. Yet, even this initiative promoted a specific way of seeing Mars: as a dynamic, vital place that merits continued research and financial commitment from NASA's exploration project—ultimately reflecting NASA’s overarching mission of extraterrestrial conquest (Messeri 2017). Our highly mediated engagements with outer space offer valuable insights into the socio-cultural nature of how humans represent the cosmos. They also demonstrate how we connect to the cosmic realm while simultaneously shaping our realities on Earth.

Analogue sites (and various forms of simulation training, more generally) offer another example of an important medium for human interaction with outer space, particularly for experimenting with aspects of human spaceflight missions. These sites allow space scientists and future astronauts to familiarise themselves with the unfamiliar environment of outer space while remaining on Earth. Analogue research typically involves travelling to locations with environmental, geological, or other conditions resembling those found on Mars or other celestial bodies, enabling the testing of equipment and mission designs. For example, ethnographic work with scientists at NASA demonstrates how Mars was brought into being as a group of scientists descended upon an analogue site in the Utah desert (Messeri 2016). These ‘mission’ members treated earthly geological formations as if they were Martian, weaving planet-specific narratives about their past and present. This experience provided the closest possible approximation of being on Mars, and it helped maintain the possibility of future human habitation on the planet. The physical and imaginary elements of the analogue mission, including the strict protocols governing ventures outside the ‘space habitat’, induced a cognitive shift among its participants, redefining the experience of living on Earth. However, these missions also possessed more practical elements. At the time of this research, NASA had stalled plans for human missions to Mars. Consequently, the activities observed by the anthropologist present also represented an attempt by NASA employees to cultivate a utopian narrative within the agency, one that preserved the possibility of Martian missions in the future (Messeri 2016).

In another ethnographic study of analogue sites, anthropologist Valentina Marcheselli worked with astrobiologists in Italian caves and mines, simulating potential microbial habitats or shelters on Mars (2022). Their embodied experiences of the caves and mines were crucial not only for transforming these earthly settings into otherworldly analogues but also for establishing astrobiology as a novel scientific discipline. The analogue astrobiological work challenged traditional scientific practices, as its observations and results were no longer solely derived from hypothesis testing but emerged through a more open-ended approach. Such embodied and open-ended research was deemed particularly suitable for a discipline dedicated to encountering and explaining the extraterrestrial unknown. Studying analogue sites, then, reveals something about the inherently dual nature of analogue space missions. In trying to keep Martian exploration viable in times of institutional contraction, or reinforcing the case for a new scientific research method, they aim to make mission participants more intimately familiar with another world, while also utilising this work to influence human engagement with this one.

In a similar vein, astronautics, or the science of space travel, is thought of by US scientists, physicians, and engineers involved in human spaceflight as relying on various ‘systems’ in order to work (Olson 2018). Such systems are defined as technologies that relate diverse concepts and materialities to one another. Thinking of human-technology constellations as systems serves a technocratic function. It contributes to perceiving outer space as governable, thereby perpetuating expansionist narratives of space exploration. The work conducted in extreme terrestrial environments, such as analogue lunar bases on the seafloor, and the allure of radically different extraterrestrial conditions, resonates with a culture in which the extreme has positive connotations as a catalyst for improvement and progress. Consequently, analogue missions participate in a cultural dynamic that frames the extreme as an imperative for overcoming challenges, fostering social innovation, and achieving distinctiveness (Olson 2018).

Earlier research on the European Space Agency (ESA) examined the entanglement of space with a different cultural dynamic, specifically the metaphor of European cooperation (Zabusky 1995). Studied during the 1990s, European cooperation in space science turned out to, paradoxically, rely on both conflict and diversity. The inherent internal diversity of European institutions, in which staff comes from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds, helps ESA employees avoid feelings of alienation and stagnation. Through regular, contested interactions and performances of difference, cooperation emerges through space technology as a form of rational solidarity. However, this process is not merely instrumental; it also constitutes a journey through which individuals experience a sacred and intense sense of community (i.e. communitas).

Even though science often claims to be largely impartial and independent of cultural influences, the social nature of the human-space interface is evident not only within the structures and practices of scientific communities, but also in the scientific outcomes of major research organisations such as NASA. Their varied internal hierarchies and interactional norms produce different kinds of scientific knowledge. Sometimes NASA's collective work modes relied on collectivist decision-making structures such as consensus, and emphasised the importance of arriving at a common ground. On other occasions, integrative work modes were favoured, stemming from a position that respected the autonomy of separate units and tried to unite the particular interests of different units in some form of a workable whole. These differing organisational structures were reflected, for example, in the authorship structure of scientific articles and in the influence that different scientific disciplines had in NASA's research (Vertesi 2020).

While the socio-cultural connections between Earth and outer space turn out to be robust, as is evident in human representations and engagements with the cosmos, it is also crucial to avoid an overly deterministic view of this relationship. While human perceptions and interactions with the universe are undoubtedly shaped by cultural narratives and social structures, these influences are multifaceted and nuanced rather than one-dimensional or all-powerful. For example, NASA employees working with Mars rovers encountered significant challenges in aligning their work schedules with the Martian day-night cycle, which is around 40 minutes longer than that of Earth. Despite the use of visual displays and other representational techniques to track Martian time, the inherent mismatch between Earth and Mars time led to confusion and—with ever-changing work schedules meant to allow staff to keep up with Mars—bodily fatigue (Mirmalek 2020). This highlights the limitations of simply imposing external (and extraterrestrial) frameworks on human experience.

Just as the human body cannot simply adapt to Martian time while remaining firmly rooted on Earth, human imaginations are not solely shaped by dominant narratives of space exploration. Ethnographic work with 'New Space' advocates, who invest in commercial space ventures (Valentine 2012), as well as space creators and enthusiasts, who popularise space exploration (Szolucha 2024), reveals a more nuanced picture. While these individuals may operate within the constraints of capitalist relations or navigate the uncertainties of a social spectacle, they also challenge conventional investment strategies, foster community, and actively produce shared visions of the future, thereby creating new social relations. The work of space creators, for example, not only popularises space exploration and makes it comprehensible to a global audience of enthusiasts, but also has the power to mould the public’s collective space myths. The collective imagination of outer space may, therefore, contain possibilities for new narratives of space exploration.

How does outer space impact human lives?

Space exploration leaves a visible mark on Earth, requiring diverse infrastructure for the manufacture and operation of space technologies. These facilities are often situated in locations perceived as remote or uninhabited. However, anthropological research foregrounds the stories of communities impacted by these developments, emphasising their needs, perspectives, and the structural biases that limit their agency. For example, several engaged anthropologists worked during the 1970s with the Yanadi, an Indigenous tribe in India with a nomadic lifestyle historically centred around hunting and gathering (Agrawal, Rao and Reddy 1985). This engagement occurred shortly after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had acquired the Yanadi’s traditional lands to establish a new space centre on an island off India’s eastern coast. The anthropologists documented the profound changes ISRO brought to the region, displacing the Yanadi from their traditional hunting grounds, offering employment opportunities, and creating new community facilities. By collaborating with the Yanadi and ISRO, the anthropologists helped negotiate extended land access rights for the tribe members and educated the ISRO about the social impacts of its activities on the Yanadi community.

The Yanadi case is not an isolated historical incident. Displacement or various degrees of neglect of Indigenous or disadvantaged populations during state or commercial encroachment on their territories has been a recurring theme in the construction and siting of space-related infrastructure, persisting to the present. In the 1980s, the space base in northeastern Brazil displaced Afro-Brazilian villagers, reflecting a history of class and racial inequality within the country (Mitchell 2017). In French Guiana, the construction and operation of ESA’s spaceport in Kourou continues to be entangled with the colonial history of the region (Redfield 2000) and its peculiar status as a European periphery (Korpershoek 2024). Currently, the Native American Esto’k Gna oppose the operations of a private space company for restricting the access to their traditional lands on the southern tip of Texas in the United States (Szolucha 2023). The proposed construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the sacred mountain of Maunakea in Hawai'i, despite sustained local protest and predicted environmental impacts, is another example (Hobart 2019; Maile 2019). Anthropologists have helped to amplify the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous and disadvantaged groups, documenting the historical legacies of inequality and injustice, while exploring potential avenues for change.

Such examples have led some social scientists to formulate more sweeping critiques of space exploration efforts, characterising them as inherently colonial and exploitative (for example, Rubenstein 2022; Treviño 2023). Against such views, critical scholars propose alternative approaches to engaging with the cosmos, such as celestial wayfinding. Aiming to mirror the way Polynesians navigated the ocean and to avoid the perpetuation of colonial dynamics in space exploration, celestial wayfinding is meant to be guided by principles of sustainable settlement, informed by an animate view of the cosmos and based on a belief in the inherent value and necessary co-existence of all beings (Lempert 2021). The !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa have been suggested as a positive and egalitarian model for social organisation of space communities (Lee 1985). Their adaptations were based on the practice of sharing, living in a small group, and being self-sufficient for a very long time. Anthropologists have also considered the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, with their emphasis on mutual learning and reciprocal interaction, as a potential model for interstellar migration (Tanner 1985). Furthermore, alternative modes of travelling and living together that have been explored in science fiction movies also hold the potential to inspire and improve space exploration (Lempert 2014; Salazar 2023).

Queer and feminist perspectives on space exploration equally offer frameworks for reimagining it. ‘Queering the cosmos’ would involve liberating it from the constraints of established, often limited, visions of the future and opening it up to multiple possibilities (Oman-Reagan 2015). Similarly, feminist approaches to space travel challenge the presumption of heterosexuality—pervasive within the imaginaries and designs of human spaceflight—and critically examine the ideological and structural biases that lead to exclusionary and oppressive practices and imaginaries (Gál and Armstrong 2023).

While various critical approaches are being proposed to ‘reclaim outer space’ (Schwartz, Billings and Nesvold 2023) a growing body of anthropological work is emerging in parallel that challenges the seemingly monolithic character of modern space projects. On the one hand, space infrastructure developments are typically justified in the name of scientific and economic advancement for a specific community, region, or even nation. While the examples above illustrate some significant challenges and pitfalls of these justifications, space projects may mobilise a sense of hope, agency, and visions of alternative futures that extend beyond serving as an escape plan for a select few (Denning 2023). They can provide alternative visions of international cooperation and even increased ecological care.

At the same time, outer space has always held the potential for increased militarisation, neocolonialism, and extractivism. Anthropologists demonstrate that these two facets, of care and extractivism, are inextricably linked and that space exploration, while perpetuating harmful legacies, also automatically elicits alternative practices and visions of the future (see, for example, Ojani 2024). Many Mexicans, for example, reveal complex imaginaries surrounding space. They see space exploration as a pathway to economic development through technological innovation while simultaneously emphasising the need to critically reflect on the conditions that shape its achievement (Johnson 2020). Similarly, astronomers in Madagascar demonstrate that a problematic and culturally specific notion of the ‘universality of science’ can nevertheless serve as a tool for navigating inequalities on Earth (Nieber 2024). Assuming that science is to some extent universal is not just an epistemic requirement for gaining entry into an international scientific network. It is also a horizon of possibility, one that offers both hope and direction.

How does outer space influence our understanding of social reality?

Outer space not only affects people’s lives but also recalibrates their structures of understanding. Being outside Earth and thinking about the cosmos involves encountering extraterrestrial materialities and contexts that are unfamiliar or behave in unexpected ways. Living in microgravity on the International Space Station (ISS), for example, removes the people involved from the familiar bounds of Earth and from usual ways of being and feeling human. The physical experience of weightlessness affects emotions and their social expression, demonstrating how gravity—a condition we typically take for granted—influences not only the human body but also emotions and social relations. This is because the effective communication of emotions and human relations depends on certain material conditions. When those are dramatically altered in such environments as outer space, a simple hug, for example, becomes a challenge because bodies behave and react differently than they would on Earth. The hug becomes a somewhat awkward experience, because bodies of astronauts struggle to align and exchange the same sense of touch they would under the conditions of gravity (Parkhurst and Jeevendrampillai 2020). Similarly, venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere allows us to reconsider its role as a primary context, one that provides the reference points for our fundamental understandings and distinctions, such as the one between nature and culture, for example (Battaglia 2012; Valentine 2016). An anthropological engagement with outer space turns out to broaden the notions of what constitutes an ‘environment’ and to decentre our geocentric and anthropocentric perspectives (Battaglia, Valentine and Olson 2015; Helmreich 2012; Olson and Messeri 2015).

This recalibrating nature of outer space has also prompted a rethinking of anthropological methodologies (see, for example, Gorbanenko, Jeevendrampillai and Kozel 2025). Specifically, it has been suggested that anthropological research be recontextualised in ‘more-than-terran’ spaces (Olson 2023), to think about fieldwork as having significance and being localised beyond Earth, and as being entangled with entities, dynamics, and phenomena beyond Earth-based contexts. While humans’ earthly embeddedness is undeniable, an expanded methodological toolkit would acknowledge that societies already exist on a boundary between terrestrial and extraterrestrial realms. However, how radically methodologies need to be adjusted is currently somewhat under dispute. Given that people constantly negotiate their social existence through a dialogue with their social and material worlds, life on Earth may be quite mediated already and therefore not that different to study than life in space (Jeevendrampillai et al. 2023).

Ethnographic research in locations like the ISS is unlikely to occur anytime soon, given how expensive and hard it is to access. Studying Earth-based space infrastructures related to it, such as its Mission Controls, is much more feasible and can still be highly elucidating. Ethnographers can more easily enter a meeting in ground-based buildings by government agencies and companies designing space experiments or observe livestreamed conversations with ISS crews. Seemingly remote locations can thus be studied via the multiple, interconnected sites, media, and groups of people that constitute a field both up in space and here on Earth (Buchli 2020). These include the constant online presence of the ISS, multimedia archives, and communities tracking the ISS from Earth.

Space activities, both on Earth and in outer space, are dispersed across vast distances and dynamically evolving networks. Therefore, field sites are never stable entities but are better understood as sometimes-atomised and relational spaces connected through shared meanings and materialities (Timko 2024). The distributed nature of space-related sites and globally dispersed communities has led to the idea of a ‘planetary ethnography’ (Szolucha et al. 2022; 2023). This approach to research seeks to push the boundaries of representation to uncover new perspectives both by engaging with diverse social groups across different cultures and by bringing them into a comparative analysis that can reveal unexpected alliances or effect a change in perspective. These under- or unrepresented experiences and viewpoints, much like the extraterrestrial itself, should have the potential to revisit and reorient entire fields of understanding, rather than simply adding another perspective, one that remains on the periphery.

Conclusion

Although outer space remains a physically distant horizon, unreachable for most, it is closer than one may think. It plays a significant role in the everyday lives of diverse groups, from Indigenous communities to the global network of space professionals. Through their engagement with outer space and its many representations, they make communal histories, social norms, as well as distant celestial objects and phenomena more readily comprehensible. In doing so, they reshape social relations and realities here on Earth. Regardless of how they connect with the sky, people worldwide seem to actively strive to forge more intimate relationships with the cosmos, underscoring its inextricable link to human life.

But why is this connection with the universe so important? Perhaps the answer lies in viewing outer space as a social and cultural canvas, one on which individuals and communities can project their understanding of the present social order and their aspirations for the future. For example, Russian cosmonautic amateurs who build and test satellites and other space technologies hold the idea that anyone can participate in space exploration, even without government backing (Sivkov 2019). Their activities highlight the importance of merit and technological know-how in driving space exploration. Therefore, engaging with the cosmos allows them to critique the social and political realities of their country. Outer space can thus be understood as a field for critiquing current social conditions and experimenting with potential alternatives.

Popular representations of extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects (‘UFOs’) have also been interpreted as expressions of broader socio-political concerns. These include feelings of alienation and mistrust towards political representatives. Alien abduction narratives equally reflect anxieties, including concerns about racial and ethnic difference. In other depictions, extraterrestrial beings are viewed as divine, expanding the scope of human understanding beyond purely scientific explanations. Historically, ‘ufology’—the study of UFOs—emerged from anxieties surrounding military tensions and technological advancements (Battaglia 2006), a dynamic that continues to resonate today.

Public interest in the cosmos waxes and wanes, driven by the vagaries of politics and cultural trends while popular sentiment toward even the most successful space programmes is often ambiguous (Launius 2003). However, anthropological research has definitively demonstrated that people worldwide actively seek deeper and more complex connections with the cosmos. It is an inextricable part of daily life, shaping their past, co-creating their present, and prefiguring their future.

This understanding challenges the detached view of the cosmos as an outside domain, a perspective some argue was reinforced by the first images of Earth taken by astronauts of Apollo missions from the void of space (Arendt 1968; Cosgrove 1994). This seemingly detached ‘view from nowhere’ may perpetuate the notion that the cosmos is simply there for the taking, whether by technologically advanced nations or an oligarchy-controlled private sector. If technological engagement with outer space expands in the coming decades, largely fuelled by commercial and military-led space ventures, what convergences and tensions will emerge with the fundamental human drive for cosmic intimacy? One thing is certain: humanity will discover ever-new ways to imbue outer space with meaning, both on Earth and beyond.

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Note on contributor

Anna Szolucha is an Associate Professor and Principal Investigator of the ARIES (Anthropological Research into the Imaginaries and Exploration of Space) project at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. Her research interests lie at the intersection of new technologies, natural resources, and society.

Research for this article received funding from the National Science Centre, Poland, project number 2020/38/E/HS3/00241.

Anna Szolucha, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, ul. Golebia 9, 31-007 Krakow, Poland. ORCID: 0000-0001-8938-6066

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Humanitarianism

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 17:00:56 +0000

Bosnians waiting at a UN food distribution point in the town Ilijaš, in 1996. Picture by AMN M. Andrea

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima Malay Firoz

University of Bristol, Arizona State University

Initially published 18 Oct 2025

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

Abstract:

Humanitarianism can be broadly understood as a concern with human suffering and a moral desire to alleviate it. It manifests not only through discrete acts of helping, but also through a set of practices, norms, laws, and forms of government. The urgency of humanitarian causes is regularly invoked to justify the large-scale mobilisation of people and resources. They provide anthropologists with a critical site for studying the structural tension between two competing impulses within humanitarianism: the ethical yearning to alleviate suffering, and the political inclination to control suffering populations.

This entry explores four main areas of anthropological scholarship on humanitarianism. First, anthropologists have examined the political implications of the humanitarian management of suffering populations, with its emphasis on fostering physical survival. Second, they have developed critiques of humanitarian ethics, particularly in relation to how lives are valued differently within Western humanitarianism, and the political and moral weight carried by the word ‘humanitarian’. Third, anthropologists have interrogated the concept of crisis, with a focus on how local communities are transformed by the routine presence of humanitarians in protracted conflicts or disasters. Finally, they have explored non-Western humanitarian practices rooted in different traditions of care and different scales of action.

As climate change impacts prospects for human life in vulnerable areas of the world, it is likely that climate-induced displacement crises will only grow more common and prolonged. Humanitarianism’s definitions, boundaries, and limits will also shift in response, offering anthropologists an important terrain of inquiry into how societies frame, mitigate, and manage the suffering of others.

Introduction

In the public imagination, the term ‘humanitarian’ invokes a concern for human suffering and a motivation to alleviate it in some form. It gestures to an altruism borne of the recognition of a shared humanity with distant others. One need only think of humanitarian appeals launched on TV, social media, or billboards to see how representations of the suffering of others might inspire an urge to act (Boltanski 2004), be it through donations, volunteering, or public support for governmental action. These sentiments can mobilise people and resources on a large scale in response to disruptive events with devastating human impacts, such as armed conflicts and disasters. Given the scope and reach of humanitarian deployments, it is vital to understand their inner workings and their unintended consequences. This is particularly important because the concept of humanitarianism can be used by different actors for different purposes and in different contexts, ranging from calls for emergency assistance in the aftermath of earthquakes to justifications for military interventions with the purported aim of saving lives. As a contested concept with multiple meanings and uses, humanitarianism offers an especially rich and productive site of research for anthropology.

One of the enduring origin stories of humanitarianism dates its creation to the establishment of the Red Cross by Henry Dunant in response to the suffering he witnessed at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. In its early years, the Red Cross primarily provided medical assistance to soldiers wounded in battle, though the organisation would later expand its scope to include civilians affected by war and disasters. Today, the sector is represented by United Nations (UN) agencies such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in partnership with international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF), Oxfam, Save the Children, among others. The Red Cross has also grown into a more complex institution, with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) being a private entity under Swiss law, while national Red Cross Societies such as the British Red Cross or the Syrian Arab Red Crescent function as appendices of the states where they are based. Each of these organisations has different mandates and modes of operation, but they generally share an emphasis on prioritising urgent needs through specialised life-sustaining aid, including medical care, shelter, and food assistance. It is important to note, however, that these organisations comprise a highly institutionalised and largely Western mould of humanitarianism, originating and headquartered in Global North countries, whereas there are other forms of humanitarian aid espoused by religious, community, and grassroots actors both within and outside the West that are not encompassed by the formal Western aid system (Brković 2023).

Early scholarly critiques of Western humanitarianism highlighted how humanitarian actors took ‘war as a fact’, in the sense that they sought to remedy not the root causes of war but the suffering that resulted from it. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross in its foundational tenets acknowledged the persistence of war in modern life, and sought to collaborate with all parties to conflict—including states and non-state armed groups—to humanise its conduct and minimise the suffering it caused (Kennedy 2004, 267). Such a narrow focus on suffering, however, failed to consider how aid could fuel the conditions for further conflict. Numerous examples exist from conflict zones across the world where aid has been diverted by armed groups to sustain the fighting, or fomented violence and resentment between different groups, or used to recruit new soldiers from refugee camps and settlements. In particular, the figure of the ‘refugee-warrior’ benefiting from aid poses a moral and political conundrum for aid workers working to provide humanitarian sanctuaries in the midst of war (Terry 2002).

Scholars have also criticised humanitarianism for its historical complicity with Western colonialism and imperialism, and for the continued instrumentalisation of aid to serve the geopolitical and national security interests of donor countries in the Global North (Barnett 2011; Donini 2012). Governments throughout the twentieth century have justified military actions on humanitarian grounds, from India’s intervention in East Pakistan in 1971 to NATO air strikes in Kosovo in 1999 (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010). While these actions have not necessarily involved the explicit cooperation of humanitarian INGOs, the United States’ long war in Afghanistan from 2001 until 2021 co-opted aid organisations into counter-insurgency programs aimed at ‘winning hearts and minds’ among local communities through developmental aid and reconstruction efforts (Williamson 2011). While this entry primarily focuses on the values and practices of aid actors rather than states, we discuss the growing entanglement between humanitarianism and development and its implications for the independence of aid organisations from geopolitical agendas.

Anthropology has contributed to these debates by questioning the foundational notion that humanitarianism is an inherently altruistic enterprise, and by interrogating the power relations that underpin the humanitarian endeavour. Anthropologists have asked: what does it mean to help ‘suffering others’? Who is being helped and how are their lives valued? Who is providing assistance and what motivates them? The discipline helps answer these questions through sustained ethnographic inquiries into the everyday operations of humanitarian organisations, and the social, political, and ethical implications of the humanitarian drive to help. In particular, it points to a structural tension between two competing impulses within humanitarianism: the ethical yearning to alleviate suffering, and the political inclination to control suffering populations. The anthropological approach to humanitarianism as ‘an ethos, a cluster of sentiments, a set of laws, a moral imperative to intervene, and a form of government’ (Ticktin 2014, 274) captures this tension.

Other anthropologists have challenged the predominant focus of scholarship on Western institutionalised forms of humanitarianism, and have pushed for a broader understanding of the concept that encapsulates grassroots mutual aid initiatives led and implemented by vulnerable people themselves (Brković 2020). After all, impacted populations are often ‘first responders’ to crises through mutual aid networks involving community, religious, and local organisations, blurring the boundaries between the ‘providers’ and ‘recipients’ of aid (Fechter 2023). Large-scale responses organised by UN agencies, INGOs, and foreign governments arrive later as a crisis garners international attention, displacing local interpretations of humanitarian giving with professional guidelines and principles.

Biopolitics and the management of populations

The gradual institutionalisation of Western humanitarianism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took place at a time when ideas about the state’s responsibility to care for its citizens assumed growing legitimacy (Glasman 2020). Anthropological studies of humanitarianism are therefore profoundly influenced by the concept of ‘biopolitics’, which refers to governmental techniques and procedures that aim ‘to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order’ (Foucault 1998, 138). Biopolitics encompasses a range of practices and institutions established to regulate the health, reproduction, and sexuality of the biological body based on hierarchical ideas about normality and deviance. Humanitarian actors can be thought of as exercising a form of biopolitics in contexts where state actors are either absent or incapable of safeguarding life (Fassin 2007b; Pandolfi 2003; Redfield 2005; Ticktin 2014).

Much of the anthropological writing on this area has analysed the biopolitical logics and rationales espoused by humanitarian INGOs in the management of populations they purport to help. MSF, for example, enacts a ‘minimal biopolitics’ (Redfield 2013, 18) as they temporarily administer to lives perceived to be in immediate danger—providing medical assistance to endangered populations in conflict zones and ceasing operations once they deem the crisis is over. The INGO’s decision-making on the deployment and withdrawal of personnel is based on assessments of the magnitude of life-threatening needs, such as medical care or child nutrition, and critics have noted instances when MSF waited for the crisis to grow more aggravated before establishing a field mission (Redfield 2013). This focus on temporary solutions prioritises immediate survival but does little to ensure the long-term dignity and empowerment of vulnerable people.

Another key site for the exertion of humanitarian biopolitics is the refugee camp. The refugee camp represents a ‘biopolitical figure par excellence’ (Fassin 2010a, 81), where bodies are contained, disciplined, and sustained towards a potentially indefinite future. An early ethnographic study of Burundian refugees in Tanzania described the representation of refugees in public and policy discourse as a form of ‘bare humanity’, a living body presumed to have lost all its cultural and identitarian inheritances (Malkki 1995, 11). This work presaged later critiques of humanitarian action that centred on what form of life is possible in refugee camps. Drawing from the concept of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998)—which denotes a form of persecuted humanity reduced to its basic biological existence—anthropologists argued that refugee camps are zones of exception that sustain people only at the level of physical survival and prevent them from realising their full biographical selves as social and political beings (Agier 2011; Diken and Laustsen 2006; Hanafi and Long 2010; McConnachie 2016). Such framings of refugees as ‘bare life’ presupposed an ethnically homogenous nation-state as the ‘natural order of things’, from which refugees were excluded as demographically threatening outsiders (Malkki 1995).

In recent years, anthropologists have questioned the notion that refugees are merely passive subjects of humanitarian management, or that refugee camps are little more than temporary way-stations without a lived history of their own. A growing body of ethnographic work on camps has pointed to the political agency, heterogeneous identities, place-making practices, and transgenerational memory of refugees living in long-term camps. Palestinian camps in particular have fostered a robust national liberation movement, which imbues everyday spaces with intense political significance (Allan 2014; Gabiam 2016; Peteet 2005). Similarly, Burundian Hutus living in Tanzanian camps during the 1980s developed new expressions of Hutu identity anchored in shared narratives of victimisation and memories of violent displacement. In their case, the camp represented a locus of ‘purity’ that protected Hutu identity from contamination through assimilation (Malkki 1995). In other words, refugee camps over time become invested with a ‘politics of living’ (Feldman 2018), revealing how refugees not only survive, but strive, thrive, and contest their devaluation as ‘bare life’.

Beneficiaries of aid also reshape the terms of their humanitarian protection. For example, as the French government tightened its immigration policies in the early 2000s, it introduced a humanitarian exception for undocumented immigrants with life-threatening illnesses that could not access adequate medical treatment in their country of origin. Facing stricter bureaucratic requirements and longer wait times, many immigrants translated their narratives of suffering into medical categories, or even deliberately infected themselves in order to qualify for medical asylum, thereby leveraging the diseased body as an object of humanitarian concern (Ticktin 2006; 2011). Paradoxically, their survival depended on their very exposure to vulnerability (Ticktin 2006). ‘Bare life’ in these instances is not associated with passive victimhood, but points to the myriad ways in which migrants wield their biological vulnerability as a form of capital. Taken together, this literature on humanitarian biopolitics reveals that international aid wields enormous managerial power over the subjects it governs while being actively contested and appropriated by those subjects as well.

Humanitarian ethics

In 1965, the Red Cross established seven fundamental principles governing humanitarian practices—humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity, and universality—which have since found widespread adoption across the aid sector (International Committee of the Red Cross 2015). Taken together, these principles embody a form of secular morality committed to the sacred but material value of all life (Redfield 2012a). Furthermore, humanitarian morality serves as a governing framework that extends beyond formal humanitarian institutions and may be invoked by state and non-state actors alike. Didier Fassin (2007a) calls this a form of ‘humanitarian government’. Concerns around the formulation of ethical objectives and processes in governmental affairs has garnered keen interest from anthropologists studying the intersections between life, health, and suffering (Daniel 1996; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Kleinman et al. 1997; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003). One of the core challenges they raise pertains to the ethical ideal of humanity that underpins humanitarian action. During the early years of the Iraq War, for instance, a worsening security outlook compelled MSF to terminate its operations in the country, evacuate its staff, and leave behind vulnerable populations unassisted (Fassin 2010b). Humanitarians thus produced a ‘politics of life’ by establishing a hierarchy of humanity between the lives deemed worthy of saving and those left to perish (Fassin 2007b; 2012).

This hierarchy also manifests among aid workers themselves. Ethnographies of humanitarian diplomacy have revealed how local aid workers skilfully leverage their identities to negotiate humanitarian access in places torn apart by ethnic strife (James 2022; Pottier 2006). However, even as they are uniquely positioned to deliver aid in areas inhospitable to international staff, local aid workers also face greater risks to their own safety and more limited prospects for career progression within the organisations that employ them. Transnational border regimes permit humanitarian staff from the Global North to travel more easily between countries, usually along geographical circuits established by colonial history (Redfield 2012b). Meanwhile, aid workers hired locally by INGOs from the Global South frequently do not have the option to evacuate if their lives are endangered, or receive the same standard of international care should they fall ill (Benton Forthcoming).

In the context of the Syrian Civil War, for example, restrictions on the entry of foreign nationals into the country placed the responsibility of providing humanitarian assistance entirely onto Syrian aid workers. While shouldering the risk of navigating an active warzone, these local humanitarian teams were nevertheless managed by INGOs with offices in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, with major policy decisions being taken by senior leadership predominantly from the Global North (Fradejas‐García 2019). Even within the humanitarian sector, therefore, human lives are valued differently according to their race, gender, nationality, and other markers of social difference (Firoz and Lima 2024). The ‘politics of life’ maintains hierarchies between not only aid workers and refugees, but between different categories of aid workers as well.

At an institutional level, the ethical principle of neutrality dictates that humanitarian actors must not take sides in hostilities in order to secure trust by all parties involved and maintain access to vulnerable populations. While a neutral stance appears to position humanitarians ‘beyond politics’, anthropologists point out that this claim to neutrality is also a tactical one, as aid workers regularly engage in political negotiations with warring parties behind closed doors (Redfield 2012a; Malkki 2015, 174). Rather than simply retreating from politics, neutrality is deployed as a political strategy toward political actors, constituting ‘an impossible or negative form of politics’ (Redfield 2010a). Such paradoxes in humanitarian logics represent what Fassin calls ‘aporias’, which, ‘contrary to contradictions, are not a matter of organisational dysfunction but rather of the dysfunction intrinsic to their very functioning’ (2010c, 50). These aporias have been constitutive of Western humanitarianism from its very inception, and at the same time remain insurmountable for the success of its mandate.

Another question related to humanitarian ethics is the political weight carried by the attribution of the term ‘humanitarian’. Humanitarianism is an unstable concept and claims to being humanitarian have to be maintained through constant ‘ethical labour’, which can be described as ‘an ethical practice that join[s] concern for others with care of the self’ (Feldman 2007; cited in Brada 2016). For example, in an HIV clinic in Botswana where American healthcare staff worked alongside with national staff, the former’s claim to be ‘humanitarian’ engendered a sense of ‘unquestionable technical and moral superiority’ that disregarded the ethical commitments and expertise of their Motswana counterparts (Brada 2016, 757).

Even for beneficiaries of aid, the ethical claim to humanitarian relief carries important political connotations. Palestinians have resisted for decades the framing of aid they receive from the UN as ‘development’—broadly construed as the long-term improvement of human life—and insisted on a humanitarian narrative that highlights the transience of their status as refugees (Gabiam 2012). Here, the appeal to humanitarian aid is not only pitched as a global right, but rather, amplifies the urgency of their predicament. Like the immigrants who leverage their biological vulnerability, Palestinians leverage their status as humanitarian subjects to demand a political solution that guarantees their right to return to their lands.

Finally, it is worth noting that anthropological critiques of humanitarian ethics do not dismiss the ethical commitments of individual aid workers, but rather, address the systems and structures within which they perform their ethical labour. In her ethnography of the Finnish Red Cross, Malkki (2015) questions the tendency of critics to trivialise small gestures of humanitarian care, such as making toys or weaving blankets, as being insufficient for real structural transformation. Rather than simply equating the ‘real’ with the grand ambitions of geopolitics, she calls for scholars to take the sentimental practices of humanitarians seriously as a form of ‘imaginative politics’ that is rooted in culturally specific modes of helping. Such an analytical orientation resonates closely with how anthropologists describe the mandate for an anthropological approach to morality and the social good, which requires attending ‘to the way people orientate to and act in a world that outstrips the one most concretely present to them, and to avoid dismissing their ideals as unimportant or, worse, as bad-faith alibis for the worlds they actually create’ (Robbins 2013, 457). In other words, anthropology does not adopt a moralising or normative stance on humanitarian action itself, but rather, empirically traces what moral commitments mean to aid workers themselves and how they are practiced, challenged, and transformed during humanitarian emergencies.

The politics of ‘crisis’

The large-scale mobilisation of humanitarian interventions relies on the naming of specific sites as ‘emergencies’ or ‘crises’. The label of crisis evokes the sense of a temporary interruption in social order, an ‘unpredictable event emerging against a background of ostensible normalcy’ that will eventually be succeeded by the return to normalcy (Calhoun 2013, 30). The declaration of crisis produces a temporality of urgency that demands immediate action, and cultivates moral clarity for humanitarian actors to intervene (Redfield 2013; Calhoun 2004; Roitman 2014). However, by virtue of this logic of naming, situations that remain ‘on the verge of crisis’ or in ‘states of permanent emergency’ are sometimes confounded with the ‘ordinary’—a non-site for humanitarianism—leaving aid organisations in a state of ethical uncertainty, constantly renegotiating the terms of their engagement (Redfield 2010b; Pandolfi 2010). Ethnographies that address the categorisation of crisis situations, and the potentially novel sites and modes of operation that emerge from this exercise, are therefore especially useful for uncovering the ‘complexities, limits and boundaries’ of humanitarianism as it responds to new challenges (Ticktin 2014, 283).

There are many areas of protracted conflict or displacement where humanitarian actors have been at work for decades. Anthropologists have analysed these contexts to inquire how crises are experienced and understood by the populations impacted by them, in some cases over multiple generations. Haiti is one such context. The country has seen waves of civil unrest, authoritarian rule, and gang violence since the 1990s, coupled with disasters such as the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, a cholera epidemic in its aftermath, and more recently the disintegration of the country’s state apparatus. Haiti was often dubbed a ‘Republic of NGOs’, characterising the prolonged administration of life during this period by aid organisations, with international funding being channelled mainly to humanitarian and development actors rather than the country’s own government (Schuller 2017). As aid came to encompass all aspects of daily living, the presence and logics of humanitarian care became banal (Beckett 2019). Anthropologists make a similar point about the decades-long displacement of Palestinians, for whom crisis is a ‘condition of life’ and whose everyday survival hinges upon their claims on humanitarian rights (Feldman 2012). In such contexts, everyday life is saturated with layers of crises past and present, such that the very idea of crisis becomes ordinary. Put differently, crisis becomes ‘an atmosphere – the often invisible outer layer of life that surrounds us, envelops us, and comes to be taken for granted or even ignored’ (Beckett 2020, 79).

Narratives of crisis can also be rendered useful to neoliberal governing strategies. We might look at the recent shift among aid organisations towards an auditorial approach to aid: instead of engaging directly with vulnerable communities during a crisis, the ICRC has pivoted to tutoring state actors or armed groups on monitoring threats and violations through the collection of data, the production of indicators, and the use of risk management tools (Billaud 2020; Lima 2022). In Rio de Janeiro, for example, a humanitarian programme created by ICRC trained healthcare workers on how to promote their own safety while also protecting their patients from the risk of gun violence, since local police did not operate effectively in territories controlled by drug-trafficking gangs (Lima 2022).

Aid organisations have similarly adopted a ‘managerial orientation’ that frames refugees as an economic burden for host states and advocates strategies to mitigate the burden through international cooperation (Calhoun 2013, 41). For Global South countries where the large majority of the world’s displaced population resides, such strategies also offer unique economic opportunities. Under the auspices of building refugee resilience and self-reliance, UN agencies have negotiated livelihood rights for refugees in exchange for exploiting their labour to benefit the developmental agendas of host states (Easton-Calabria and Omata 2018; Skran and Easton-Calabria 2020). For instance, the Jordan Compact launched in 2016 committed the host government to providing vocational training, the formalisation of Syrian businesses, and the provisioning of temporary work permits for Syrian refugees in designated labour sectors, in exchange for US $1.7 billion in international assistance and trade concessions for Jordanian exports to Europe (Lenner and Turner 2019). This approach was formalised in 2018 into the Global Compact on Refugees between donors and aid organisations, providing a blueprint for future humanitarian responses to mass displacement.

Humanitarian crises are thus used by states to advance the frontiers of what scholars have called ‘disaster capitalism’, forcing open new territories and economic sectors to capital accumulation (Gunewardana and Schuller 2008; Klein 2007; Swamy 2021). At the same time, the promise of development is designed to incentivise refugee integration in the Global South and prevent their onward migration to the Global North. This multi-pronged approach to aid, often referred to as the ‘humanitarian–development nexus’ (Lie 2020; Strand 2020) or in some cases the ‘humanitarian–development–security’ nexus (Riggan and Poole 2024), anchors the legitimacy of humanitarian efforts to the national interests of host states and the security agendas of donor states, which many scholars and practitioners consider a betrayal of core humanitarian values such as neutrality and independence.

De-centring Western humanitarianism

Recent anthropological scholarship has attempted to de-centre the analytical focus on Western institutionalised humanitarianism by turning its attention to humanitarian practices rooted in different traditions of care and different scales of action. The principles guiding these alternative forms of humanitarianism can differ markedly from the Red Cross principles espoused by international organisations, and are often more consonant with cultural notions of mutual aid and communal solidarity found among grassroots networks that emerge in response to emergencies. To understand these ‘vernacular humanitarianisms’, anthropologists propose to interrogate ‘what people in a certain place understand as ‘human’, ‘humanity’, or ‘humanitarian’, and then to build an analysis from there’ (Brković 2023, 9).

Displaced communities in Myanmar, for example, routinely alternate between the positions of aid provider and aid recipient depending on their circumstances: those who are helped might shift to helping others once they are settled (Fechter and May 2024). Similarly, Greek humanitarians helping migrants (solidarians) during the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean actively refused the labels of ‘volunteer’, ‘beneficiaries’, or ‘services’ when describing their motivations, insisting instead on a principle of solidarity based on horizontal, non-hierarchal relations (Rozakou 2017). These cases of Myanmar and Greece are not uncommon, and highlight the value of letting in-depth ethnographic research inform our understanding of how people invest the concepts of humanitarianism and humanity with meaning (Brković 2023).

We may alternatively examine how states and civil society in the non-Western world mobilise aid for distant others by drawing on different articulations of suffering, rights, and humanity (Osanloo and Robinson 2024). Anthropologists have drawn our attention to an older genealogy of humanitarian care rooted in the Hindu concept of dān, which refers to the sacred virtue of charity considered essential for spiritual liberation in Hinduism (Bornstein 2012). Whereas the anthropology of humanitarianism often separates religious philanthropy from professional humanitarianism, the shared symbolism of the ‘gift’ binds both institutionalised redistribution and individual acts of giving to shifting notions of citizenship and the entitlements it affords. Similarly, the concept of zakat undergirding Islamic humanitarianism is seen by its adherents not as a voluntary virtue but as a form of ‘financial worship’ that purifies both the giver and the receiver (Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan 2003). While this pillar of Islam may have functioned as an early system of social security, anthropologists note that it has diminished in modern Islamic states from a public welfare institution into a private, voluntary practice of piety.

The idea of humanitarian duty as synonymous with service to God continues to survive at other scales of civil society. The distribution of free meals near a mosque in Cairo, for instance, was primarily motivated not by a formalised commitment to alleviate human suffering but by khidma, a sense of service ‘directed by’ and ‘at God’ (Mittermaier 2024, 256). In Northern Pakistan, humanitarian action is often motivated by jazba, an ‘emotional impulse’ or ‘spirit to get the unlikely done’ and to leave behind a material legacy of concrete, transformative projects (Mostowlansky 2020, 251). These specific orientations notwithstanding, the broader geopolitical logics of Islamic humanitarianism can still at times echo its Western counterparts: Turkish humanitarians, operating in Islamic Africa south of the Sahara, draw on the heritage of a shared religion but nevertheless frame themselves as heirs to an Ottoman civilisation that protects its less fortunate Black African neighbours. The racialised and colonial underpinnings of ‘white’ Turkish humanitarianism here reproduce the historical associations between Western humanitarianism and the European colonial project (Güner 2023).

Conclusion

As prospects for life on earth deteriorate with climate change, it is likely that climate-induced displacement will only grow more protracted and routine for the world’s most vulnerable communities. Humanitarianism’s definitions, boundaries, and limits will also shift in response, as a new array of actors mobilise humanitarian logics to pursue their own agendas. New spaces may be reframed as sites for humanitarian intervention, such as cities affected by urban violence (Lima 2022), while existing sites and instruments such as refugee camps may continue to proliferate. To deal with these emerging challenges, humanitarians are innovating with new technologies, including drones, biometrics, digital currencies, artificial intelligence, blockchains, and algorithmic data management. Anthropologists tend to remain sceptical of such limited, technical solutions to humanitarian needs, and often warn against the sector’s deepening reliance on proprietary tools—often developed in partnership with Big Tech companies—that rely on extractive data collection practices with minimal safeguards for refugee privacy, rights, and freedoms (Ajana 2013; Firoz 2024; Iazzolino 2021; Scott-Smith 2016; Tazzioli 2019).

In 2025, international humanitarianism faces one of the largest financial crises in its history. Following the abrupt withdrawal of support from the world’s largest humanitarian donor, the United States, donors across Europe also implemented major reductions in their aid budgets. Humanitarian organisations have warned of disastrous consequences for food security, primary healthcare, disaster relief, educational access, poverty alleviation, and refugee protection across the globe. In particular, the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has sent shockwaves through the sector, interrupting operational partnerships and supply chains. At the same time, the complicity of Western states with Israel’s genocide in Gaza has also undermined the framework of international law that enshrine humanitarian rights and obligations. As another genocide rages on in Sudan, it is more difficult than ever to imagine a sustainable future for survivors of humanitarian crises. In a future marked by resource scarcity, ecological collapse, warfare, and militarised borders, when the protections once afforded by citizenship are waning and the moral appeal of our shared humanity is endangered by the resurgence of authoritarianism, humanitarianism will continue to offer anthropologists a vital terrain of inquiry to understand how societies frame, mitigate, and manage the suffering of others.

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Notes on contributors

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima is a research associate in anthropology at the University of Bristol, and was previously Lecturer in Disaster Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. His work has featured in American Anthropologist, Humanity, and Focaal. Pedro has also previously co-convened the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, 43 Woodland Rd, Bristol BS8 1TH.

Malay Firoz is an assistant professor of anthropology at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. He currently serves as director of ASU's Global Human Rights Hub and has previously co-convened the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Firoz’s work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Humanity, Migration and Society, among others, and has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Malay Firoz, Faculty Administration Building S171, 4701 W. Thunderbird Road, Mail Code 3051, Glendale, AZ 85306-4908, USA. malay.firoz@asu.edu. ORCiD: 0000-0002-1323-1946.

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Time

Felix Stein — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 18:25:09 +0000

Bronze cast by Hugo Wolfgang Rheinhold, c. 1893, depicting multiple temporalities in tension. Picture by Wikimedia.

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov

Initially published 10 Jun 2025

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

Abstract:

Time, from an anthropological perspective, is culturally specific and inseparable from our understanding of the world and our place in it. Anthropology charts how and to what extent time is culturally constituted, and how, increasingly, these cultural constructs coexist, come into conflict, and colonise each other. This entry introduces time as a field of anthropological inquiry, including its emergence in philosophy and evolutionary thought, and the dialogue between physics’ relativity theory and anthropology’s cultural relativist approach to time. The anthropology of time has asked whether it is a multiple cultural and social construct, and how its multiplicity may be explored ethnographically, be it within a given society, in contexts of socio-cultural contact, or in the context of globalisation. Being attuned to temporal multiplicities enables anthropologists to improve how social and cultural research is conducted and to ask under which circumstances temporal multiplicities can be productive for anthropological theory and practice. The entry concludes with laying out the importance of anthropology to understand time in the age of the Anthropocene.

Introduction

Time is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. Ancient and contemporary philosophers have not come to a consensus as to whether time exists independent from the entities and activities within it (Bardon 2024). Physicists of the twentieth century, notably Albert Einstein, made waves by reaffirming that time was not independent of the world, but was in fact conditioned by matter and movement. Their ideas soon reached the humanities, notably philosophy (Bergson 1924; Cassirer 1922) and anthropology. For example, Russian anthropologist Vladimir Bogoraz took Einstein’s famous insight that time is not absolute but depends on the observer, to theorize indigenous accounts of time like those of the Chukchi people in the Russian Far East, whom Bogoraz had studied in the late 19th and early 20th century (1923, 57). He recounts the following story:

A shaman went to distant lands, half-legendary or even entirely fairylands. After a year or two he returns. He is at full strength, in the full bloom of his health, but his home village has completely changed. His dwelling collapsed. His wife and young son disappeared. On the road he meets an old man with a grey beard and asks him about his son. It turns out that this old man is his own son. The shaman came back younger than his son. The two years of traveling … have passed like a whole human life. (1923,19)

In providing these and other stories, Bogoraz was in dialogue with physics’ relativity theory as well as with the work of US-based anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas had argued as early as 1887 that ‘civilisation is not something absolute, but… relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilisation goes’ (1974, 64). Such ‘cultural relativism’ and physics' relativity theory inspired emerging anthropological interest in how people around the world conceive of time. It also inspired comparative literary theory such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1975) who borrowed the concept of the space-time or ‘chronotope’ from Einstein to postulate that space and time are inseparable from our understandings of the world and our place in it.

What this scholarship adds to physics is that time depends not just on the position of the observer but also on the observer's categories of thought, and their society and culture. The view of time as largely socially constructed was formulated systematically by the early twentieth century French sociologist Emile Durkheim ([1912] 1995). He acknowledged that time—along with other ‘principal categories of thought’ such as space, cause, and group (‘species’)—was so fundamental to human lives that it seemed almost inseparable from the functioning of human intellect. Given that human societies were ultimately part of nature and nature has some ‘objective value’, so too do the principal categories of thought, such as time, that humans have developed. However, Durkheim insisted that time was still largely a product of collective thought, as the ways we understand time are strongly determined by our social and cultural methods of dividing, measuring, and expressing it. Our division of time into days, weeks, months, and years corresponds to the regular recurrence of rites and ceremonies, which are ultimately social. As Durkheim put it, ‘it is not my time that is organized in this way; it is time that is conceived of objectively by all men of the same civilization’ ([1912] 1995, 10). For Durkheim, time thus had a mostly social origin even if it was never completely arbitrary.

Durkheim’s argument—that time is a largely social category that, once constructed, exerts power over society—still holds for many anthropologists today. Together with insights from Einstein’s relativity theory and Boas’ ‘cultural relativism’, it allowed scholars to investigate how people around the world make sense of time and to illustrate that seemingly common-sense understandings of it have many viable alternatives. This entry shows that alternative views of time ‘co-evolve’ with Western concepts of it (Fabian 1983) such as the global scale of universal time that underpins world capitalist economies. For anthropology, time is not one but many. This entry charts how this temporal multiplicity has been understood in a changing landscape of anthropological approaches to time, including current work on two forms of relations within such temporal multiplicities: the first consists of relations of change in which one kind of time is taken to be true and assertions of change can be made against it. The second concerns relations of exchange, where temporal differences work as resources for each other. The entry concludes with laying out the importance of anthropology to understand time in the age of the Anthropocene.

Evolutionism, diffusionism, and fieldwork

Even before time became one of the key topics of anthropological research, it already defined the discipline as it was emerging in the nineteenth century. Anthropology aimed to shed light on human history, as explored in Ancient Society (Morgan 1878), that which predated the emergence of the state and industrialised modernity (see also Maine 1861 and Tyler 1871). Yet, unlike archaeology, anthropology was interested in cultures and societies that were contemporary to it and accessible through ethnographic study. These contemporaries, such as Australian Aborigines, were assumed to illustrate ‘early’ stages of social and cultural evolution. The Native American Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) were held to illuminate the ‘Heroic age’ of Ancient Greece (Morgan 1851, 120–40). Interested in the ‘lines of human progress’ (Morgan 1878), anthropologists conceived of themselves as located at its forefront, understood to be in Europe. From there, ‘sailing to the ends of the earth’, a scholar was deemed to be ‘in fact travelling [back] in time; he is exploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an age’ (Degérando [1800] 1969, 63). Such a temporal ordering of other people’s lives reflected Western intellectual culture, where evolutionary stages were based on oversimplified dichotomies of the ‘primitive’ versus ‘civilised’, ‘backward’ versus ‘modern’, and ‘undeveloped’ versus ‘advanced’.

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, such temporal distinctions were increasingly contested on political grounds, since the subjugation and colonisation of others were frequently justified by postulating others’ ‘backwardness’ (Asad 1973). But on conceptual grounds, this temporal classification had already been contested since the late nineteenth century. The Victorian polymath and originator of eugenics Francis Galton famously argued that evolutionism, which classified human groups along temporal stages with Western cultures as the final stage, overlooked how cultures and societies influenced each other. For example, the line of socio-cultural progress may not stem from ‘simpler’ origins in the remote past to greater complexity in more recent times, but rather from recently ‘civilized’ or colonised originals to equally recent ‘duplicate copies of the same original’ that were nonetheless more ‘primitive’ (Galton 1889).

This was not to say that all insights by evolutionist scholars were wrong. One of the central contributions of evolutionary anthropology’s temporal classification was the discovery of matrilineal kinship and the political prominence of women in many societies. Far from being ‘natural’, patrilineal kinship and rule by men (‘patriarchy’) was shown to be a result of relatively recent accumulation of wealth and development of private property (Morgan 1878; Engels [1884] 1990). Galton’s objection drew anthropological attention to how often this change from ‘matriarchy’ to ‘patriarchy’ was not a matter of evolution but that of influence by dominant neighbouring cultures (Rivers 1914, volume II: 90–149). Tracing these lines of influence—the geographical spread of cultures from assumed ‘cradles of civilization’ to their imitative peripheries—came to be called ‘diffusionism’. Diffusionism reinforced the idea that space was enmeshed with time:

Since all historical events occur in space, we must be able to measure the time they needed to spread by the distances that were covered or a reading of time on the clock of the globe (Ratzel 1904, 521, cited in Fabian 1983, 19).

In the twentieth century, time remains a key research tool but in a different sense than in evolutionism or diffusionism. Anthropology develops a temporally distinct understanding of research as being based in ‘fieldwork’, holding that ‘time in the field’ (Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016) should take ‘a year or more’ (Rivers 1913, 7). Initially, field research was often much longer—frequently due to political circumstances that were as a rule un- or under-stated in academic publications. Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)—a study of early twentieth century travel and exchange off the eastern coast of New Guinea—became a manifesto for the method of ‘participant observation’ requiring that researchers not simply interview the people they study but participate in their lives. In creating this method, it was not frequently acknowledged that Malinowski’s fieldwork had only taken this long because he was not allowed to return to Europe during the First World War. As an Austrian citizen, Malinowski was considered an ‘enemy subject’ working on British colonial territory (Young 1984; Baker 1987). Bogoraz’s ethnography mentioned above took place under similarly prolonged circumstances, as it was conducted while he was in political exile in 1889-1899 for socialist activism in imperial Russia (Ssorin-Chaikov 2008).

Temporal multiplicity

Ethnographic fieldwork for ‘a year or more’ made time a research question rather than an answer. Instead of disassembling cultures into multiple layers of human evolution with cultural ‘survivals’ reflecting stages that were ‘once in existence’ (Engels [1884] 1990, 37), or tracking cultural traits over geographical space to measure their diffusion, anthropologists began to explore societies and cultures as largely coherent and self-referential units. This was done by following their internal logic, including when it comes to time.

For instance, kinship had previously been conceived through the lens of either an evolutionary timeline from ‘matriarchy’ to ‘patriarchy’ (Morgan 1878) or lines of diffusion on ‘the clock of the globe’ (Ratzel 1904). Now that anthropologists studied groups of people ethnographically, kinship became key to understanding their culturally distinct forms of temporal organisation. A classic example of this is the study of the Nuer of Southern Sudan by British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard (1940). Evans-Pritchard argued that the early twentieth century Nuer largely measured time in terms of socially relevant activities, determined by ecological change, such as where they reside during the dry and the rainy seasons of the year. However, the Nuer also conceived of time in a structural way, thinking of it as largely static. In this conception of time it formed an ‘unalterable’ distance ‘between two points, the first and last persons in a line of agnatic [father-based] descent’ (Evans-Pritchard 1940, 108) and an equally ‘unalterable’ distance between the mythical beginnings of the world and the present—so that the ‘tree under which mankind came into being was still standing in Western Nuerland a few years ago’ (1940, 108). Evans-Prichard’s work shows that time is frequently multiple—differently understood and structured not just from culture to culture but also within cultures, e.g. ecological and structural time.

Similar findings were made elsewhere. In the late 1950s, American anthropologist Clifford Geertz charted ideas of timelessness in Bali which, according to him, underpinned the Balinese calendar. Geertz examined a complex calendar which did not add up to a directional duration of years, as Western calendars would do. Instead, it featured timelessness comprising static cycles, important for religious rituals (Geertz [1966] 1973, 384). However, Geertz noted that Balinese timelessness did not prevent this predominantly Hinduist society from simultaneously noting chronological time such as exact dates, everyday occurrences, or recent historical events. Ritual timeliness coexisted with chronological or linear notions of time. Yet according to Geertz, this chronological time was of ‘distinctly secondary importance’ ([1966] 1973, 391, ft29) to the people he studied. It had emerged not ‘from within’ Balinese society but ‘from without’; that is, from a developing national state ‘whose centre of gravity lay in the cities of Java and Sumatra, where modern notions of time went hand in hand with ideas of a new nation and of youth culture’ (409–10).

Ethnographic studies of time-reckoning in 1930s Sudan and 1950s Bali showcased the many ways in which groups of people can make sense of time. This led to a debate in anthropology on whether time, particularly in its practical, everyday dimensions, is universal or culturally specific (Bloch 1977; Leach 1961; Howe 1981; Gell 1992). As part of these debates, anthropologists’ own temporal assumptions would eventually come under critique.

Temporal othering and global processes

By the 1980s, the relative autonomy of ‘field sites’ that many classical anthropological studies relied on came under question. Much anthropological work had constituted its subjects as ‘the temporal Other’ (Fabian 1983) to modernity. Ethnographies had explicitly or implicitly contrasted the lives of ‘non-modern’ peoples to that of the assumedly modern readers of anthropological work. Our lives responded to history books, calendars, and clocks, while ‘their’ lives were marked by timelessness and the falsely assumed absence of history (Wolf 1982). To remain ‘objective’— true to the reality anthropology charted—scholarship had required distance as evidence that the subjects of study were ‘independently constituted’ (Marcus and Myers 1995, 2) from the people who studied them. Now, Anthropology had to rethink its own temporal assumptions. Anthropologist became acutely aware that history in fact included the impact of societies where they were coming from on societies that anthropologists explored. Emerging scholarship now had to account for existing relationships of power between anthropologists and the people they explored, which altered the social situations where anthropologists were present as participant observers. This evinced a ‘critical ambivalence’ of the discipline’s desire for objectivity as anthropology faced itself as having been already a part of its own subjects of study’ (Marcus and Myers 1995, 2).

Several concrete solutions were developed to minimise temporal biases in anthropological research. Firstly, ‘fieldwork locations’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) were no longer thought of as being unaffected by modernity, Western cultures, or capitalist economies. They were no longer deemed to be ‘frozen in time’ or profoundly temporally distinct from Western, modern time. Places where anthropologists conduct fieldwork now appeared not as relation-neutral dots on the map or locally-specific cultural settings but rather as themselves historically produced within broader relations such as capitalist demands for resources: from gold and fur to rubber and oil, from sugar and land to workers or slaves (Mintz 1985; Wolf 1982). Following this insight, ethnography became increasingly ‘multi-sited’ (Marcus 1995), stressing that anthropology in a globalised world is about always-already interconnected spaces between what takes place ‘at home’ (of anthropologists) and in ‘the field’, i.e. the home of their research subjects. This new stance came about through research such as anthropological histories of working-class diets in Britain, which explored how British diets were linked via the North Atlantic Triangle to the changing social organisation of labour in Caribbean plantations, where sugar was produced, and to West Africa, where slaves were traded in exchange for European weapons and other goods (Mintz 1985).

A second remedy to anthropology's temporal biases was the idea of ‘multi-temporal ethnography’ (Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016), a research approach that considers the multiple temporalities of research on the one hand and the multiple temporalities of people that are being researched on the other. Ton Otto’s (2016) ethnography on the Baluan Island in Papua New Guinea in the late 1980s gives a clear example of this. Otto was invited to a funeral, after which he decided to walk back to the cemetery to take photos of the grave. For him, time for the photos was part of the ethnographic chronicle of that day. For his hosts, however, returning to the grave so soon after the funeral was dangerous, as the spirits of the dead might return to the funeral site too. The shared time between the ‘ethnographic present’ (research temporalities, including fieldwork photography) overlaps with other forms of presence—such as Baluan temporalities of kinship renewal. Otto describes how his return made his research subjects suspicious of his ritual powers to deal with the haunting pasts of the spirits of the dead. This made Otto not just an observer but also a participant in the Baluan time that he observed.

Global processes affect the shared time between the anthropologists and the people they study. Fieldwork time was institutionalised as part of annual academic rhythms, with a year in the field becoming a norm within the PhD in anthropology. Current work pressures and neoliberal employment insecurity generate more fast-paced research, as well as ‘patchwork ethnography’ (Günel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020) where shorter fieldwork periods are spread over longer, ‘punctuated’ (Guyer 2007) academic time (Faubion and Marcus 2009; Marcus and Okely 2007). PhD fieldwork stops being a period of academic isolation between anthropology student and supervisor. Instead, it is broken up by continuous email exchanges, proposal writing, and joint ‘improvising theory’ (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007). At the same time, this happens amid ‘profound temporal turbulences’ in social and cultural settings that anthropologists explore—when (and because) anthropologists ‘can no longer make assumptions about what is necessary for their method to produce rich ethnographic data—a temporally stable scene and subject of study’ (Rees 2008, 7; Rabinow 2008). The anthropological field study also happens in the context of ‘the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now’ (Marcus 2003). One of Marcus’ examples is the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy caused by a chemical accident which attracted ethnographic research in the area from 1988, yet resulting in a book publication only in 2001 (Fortun 2001).

Globalised capitalism and temporal multiplicities within groups

As a part of global capitalism, the temporalities of people’s bodies, social lives, and consumption are increasingly subsumed to the rhythms of the markets. The globalisation of sushi, for example, shows the market value of tuna depending on how quickly it can be flown to Japanese and global high-end consumers (Bestor 2008). Despite the appearance of sushi and sashimi as traditional Japanese cuisine, it is a mass capitalist invention made possible by international jumbo jets and, within Japan, trucks with highly efficient commercial refrigeration. This research into ‘just in time production’ (Harvey 1989) and more broadly the anthropology of globalisation confirms Karl Marx’s insight that globalised capital and the market-driven industrial division of labour ‘annihilates space by time’ ([1857-1859] 1973, 535). Locations of production and consumption become increasingly closer to one another by sped-up travel.

Ethnographies such as Theodore Bestor’s reveal homogenised timetabling on a global scale, which anthropologists and historians of science research as ‘empires of time’ (Aventi 1990; Galison 2004). In 1883, the adoption of Standard Railway Time for North America meant that the residents of Cornwall, Ontario, had to set their clocks back five minutes and forty-five seconds to achieve synchronicity with the rest of the rail network (Stein 2001). That same year, a convention of railroad executives in Chicago standardised five time zones for North America on the basis of British Greenwich Mean Time. This was a precursor to the International Meridian Conference in 1884 in Washington, DC, where the global scale of universal time was agreed upon to consist of 24 time zones, counted from the initial meridian for longitude passing through the Greenwich Royal Observatory, with a universal calendar based on a 24-hour day beginning at midnight in Greenwich (Stephens 1983; Ogle 2015; Kern 2003).

As such, a calendar is homogenised globally; it comes with the homogenisation of ‘the money economy’ which was demonstrated to come hand in hand with ‘the universal diffusion of pocket watches’ (Simmel [1903] 1950, 412), alongside the equally homogeneous and clear-cut boundaries between work and rest, busyness and idleness—including culturally new experiences of boredom, as in the case of Australian Aboriginal Walpiri after clock time was introduced to them (Musharbash 2007). Ethnographies have shown how quantitative time creates qualitative temporal relations. For instance, Karen Davies (1994) illustrates the tension between clock or linear time, which takes its cues from economic principles (wage labour, punctuality), and what she calls ‘process time’ or temporal relations oriented on respect, empathy, and affection for care-receivers in Swedish day nurseries. Michael Crawley explores Ethiopian long-distance runners who use digital self-tracking devices and identify themselves not as individuals competing in natural time but as parts of groups who expend energy synchronously and suffer together ‘on the part of the self … [and] on behalf of others’ as Ethiopian Orthodox Christians (2021, 662).

Standardised forms of reckoning time were imposed on different cultures and societies at different times (Aventi 1990; Stern 2012, 2021) and locations (Shresta 2015). Current research on this harkens back to the classical point made by sociologist Pitirim Sorokin that while temporal standards take the form of quantitative time, they coexist with ‘full-blooded’ sociocultural time within different social groups consisting of their own rhythms, pulsations, and conventions, including calendars. For example, the Harvard University calendar is quite different from the Boston working-class calendar ‘in regard to holidays, beginning and the end of the “school” and factory year’ (Sorokin 1943, 197).

Temporal hierarchies

The temporal multiplicities that we see playing out on a global scale filter down into people’s daily lives as hierarchies. For example, in late August 1994, I was traveling in Central Siberia with Evenki hunters and reindeer herders to the Katonga village on a tributary of the Yenisei River that divides Western and Eastern Siberia. My co-travellers were to bring their children to boarding school by September 1 for the beginning of the school year (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 26). The trip lasted two days and began in the ecological time of hunting and herding, which was imprecise from the perspective of the school calendar. Travel itself, with the hunters, herders, and their children riding reindeer, depended on how difficult it was to cross rivers, and how far we were before it got dark. We ended up being several hours late for the start of school.

September 1 designates a ‘day of knowledge’ in the Russian national calendar. It marks the beginning of the school year that has quantitative dimensions marking hours and minutes for lessons, breaks between them, fixed times for meals—all that being very different from both the activities and daily schedule in reindeer herding and hunting camps. The ‘day of knowledge’ celebration involved a pupils’ parade and calling out all new students by name, upon which they were to step forward from their line and loudly reply, ‘Here!’ When a pupil is absent, the head teacher would say, ‘Ah, [he or she is still] in the forest’, marking a hierarchical difference between the time of the state and that of people’s ordinary lives. Hierarchy can be used to structure all aspects of temporal multiplicity, be it what goes after what (‘sequencing’), exactly when things are done (‘timing’), and through what visions of the past, present, and future activities should be interpreted (Munn 1992, 116).

Hierarchy can even govern more subtle temporal multiplicities. Anthropologist Nancy Munn, who studied the ritual trade of kula shells on the eastern coast of New Guinea during the second half of the twentieth century, showed that gift-giving generates its own time. As an ‘action system’, it produces temporal circles of cyclical obligations to give and reciprocate, and the line-like time of movement of canoes between islands. Munn argues that this inter-island movement and the circulation of shells among people ‘was not in or through time and space, but that they form (structure) and constitute (create) the spacetime manifold in which they “go on”’ (1983, 280). Hierarchy plays a role here, as both obligations and canoe movements can be ‘relatively slow’ and difficult or, conversely, ‘speedy’ and easy. They depend on people’s navigational skills, correlating the social skills and power (‘fame’) of people who give and receive gifts.

In the Evenki case, moving from the forest to the village school was conceived during the Soviet era as symbolising ‘the great removal’ up another line-like process: the evolution from ‘primitive’ to ‘scientific’ communism (Bloch 2004; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003, 140–69). There are also two cyclical times at play here: that of the school calendar and that of the annual ecological movement in Siberian reindeer herding. Being punctual or not in quantitative time makes visible hierarchical arrangements of the disciplined and the undisciplined, village versus forest lifestyles, educated teachers versus ‘ignorant’ children—and ultimately the school teachers’ temporal distinctions of modern and non-modern.

When the movement is ‘relatively slow’ and difficult (we were late), school teachers were to wait for the children that were travelling with us. In this example, the teachers, i.e. people in power, were made to wait. Yet, according to recent ethnographies of waiting, waiting is usually something that people in more vulnerable structural positions must do, such as waiting in line for medical or social services or staying at a refugee camp as ‘a waiting zone’ outside of society (Auyero 2012; Janeja and Bandak 2018, 7; Jacobsen, Karlsen and Khosravi 2021). Ethnographies of time reveal waiting as a technology of governance where power is exercised through claims on other people’s time (Bourdieu 2000, 227–30). Under state socialism, making people queue became ubiquitous of not just chronic shortages of goods and ‘distributive power’ of sellers and the apparatchik (Verdery 1991), but of the ‘etatization of time' (Verdery 1996: 39-58), i.e. the increase of state control over it. However, in this Evenki case, power is exercised over people of authority such as teachers and state bureaucrats. Waiting for the Evenki to be on time is part of a longer waiting for them to move up developmental time—waiting for history to be made.

These examples highlight the hierarchical relations between different understandings of time. One kind of time, such as ecological time or waiting time, works to affirm or challenge or indeed frustrate other kinds of temporal organisation, such as calendar school time or the time of progress. Current anthropological work focuses on relations within temporal multiplicities, which are at least two: relations of change in which one kind of time is taken to be true and in doing so falsifying or replacing others, and relations of exchange, where temporal differences work as resources for each other.

Change and exchange

One notorious example for how one conception of time replaces another is the conflict between Christianity and Western science. Christian and Western scientific understandings of time are not completely opposed. The concept of singular, natural, linear time has one of its points of origin in Christianity, as a projection of Christ’s biography onto generational biblical time from Adam to Abraham (McCarthy 1997). Christian teachings also underpin the term ‘temporality’ that refers to the condition of existing within a time that is itself temporary. ‘Temporality’ originally meant worldly or secular possessions or revenues of the church or clergy as opposed to God who is ‘eternal’, that is, timeless. The term ‘temporality’ became useful in anthropology to refer to the notions of time that themselves change historically and across cultures, highlighting time-related specificity (Guyer 2007; Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016).

Today, natural time tends to claim truth over Christian time with regard to our understanding of when the world originated and of where time might lead. Natural time also states what is timeless, namely, the laws of nature. Changing from Christian to natural time is often conceived of as part of ‘progress’, as opposing these two conceptions of time is associated with broader intellectual and political questions of what constitutes scientific truth. The time of ‘predestination’ (Weber [1905] 1992) and of religiously sanctioned hierarchies (Kantorowicz 1997), differs from the Darwinist survival of the fittest. Conflicts between conceptions of time have been reflected in state ideologies and popular culture, including fiction (Beer 1980) and material artefacts. For example, the statue in picture 1 is a famous 1893 bronze cast made by German sculptor Hugo Rheinhold, entitled 'Ape with skull', about 30 centimetres high. On it, the biblical quote 'eritis sicut deus' (‘you will be as gods’) warns us against eating from the Tree of Knowledge. It restates the temporality of the fall from Eden as that of ascent of Man. The inscription features in the open book of a pile of the works of Darwin, atop of which sits an ape contemplating a human skull and holding a drawing compass with one of its feet. The statue illustrates different conceptions of time in competition with one another.

Picture 1: Ape with skull, source: Wikipedia.

ape.jpeg

Moreover, it demonstrates how meanings of time are created by where such artefacts are placed. Copies of this bronze cast are on public display at institutions of biology and medicine such as the Boston Medical Library, the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology, the Medical Library of Queen’s University, Canada, etc. Yet, the original holds pride of place in the Kremlin Museum's collection of Vladimir Lenin's belongings. The political leader of Soviet Russia had received it as a gift from a young American businessman, Armand Hammer, who visited him in 1921. As a gift, the figurine received an unintended yet well-fitting Marxist meaning: ‘You will be as gods’ was taken to refer to building a new and radically different society. The Museum catalogue highlights this gift as a sign of international ‘affection and respect… of the world’s first socialist state’ (emphasis added; Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 2; 48)—a gift of gratitude following the gift of revolution.

Even secular conceptions of time are frequently opposed. Marxist perspectives of time have been challenged by capitalist understandings of it. Eastern European socialism lost out to capitalism, in part because it constituted a different temporal logic. Socialism placed frequent focus on longer, even historic temporal scales, while capitalism placed a great premium on turnover times when producing goods, and remains obsessed with the constant compression of decision-making and other productive activities (Verdery 1996, 35). Socialism and capitalism also constituted different “chronotopes” i.e. unities of time and space specific to a particular narrative of who is ahead and who is history (Sosnina and Ssorin-Chaikov 2009). While capitalism always moves ‘forward’ in time towards neoliberalism, postsocialism can in some locations be seen to remain at least partially stuck in times of Soviet or imperial rule (Hann 2002; Müller 2019).

Thinking of time in terms of exchange highlights additional temporal aspects. Timing makes all the difference in exchange, not least when exchanging across different temporalities. Consider the following example where two kinds of time—those of the market and of gifts—work together. In 1921, the Volga River region and the Ural Mountains of Soviet Russia experienced a massive famine. Armand Hammer (mentioned above), an American graduate of Columbia Medical School, visited the country, bringing medical supplies for the relief of a typhus epidemic that accompanied the famine. In the Urals he was surprised to see stockpiles of various commodities such as fur and precious stones, which could be used to purchase grain internationally and alleviate hunger. Hammer was told that the time that it would take to trade these commodities would make the delivery of grain too late to save lives. He solved this by telegraphing the US to ask for credit to purchase grain and ship it to Russia. In addition to obtaining credit, Hammer conducted his trade at a time when the US market price for grain was at its lowest. Grain, a commodity for which he ultimately received payment from the Soviet authorities, immediately circulated as humanitarian aid. It became a gift given by the Soviet state with the help of US credit to alleviate starvation. In this example, time can be considered Hammer’s main gift. He provided timely grain, obtained timely credit, and purchased grain at the best possible market time. As he arranged this gift of grain, the temporalities of markets and gifts complemented each other, and ultimately became intermeshed. Market and gift temporalities existed in parallel and were used as resources for one another. After Hammer arranged this, Lenin invited him for a visit, making him an offer to start American commercial operations in Soviet Russia, while Hammer gave him the above sculpture in return (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 39–42).

Exchange across temporalities also occurs in other contexts. Studying container ship navigation on the Hooghly river in India, Laura Bear (2014) charts how multiple temporalities of global capitalism and river ecology converge. Navigating container ships means dealing simultaneously with the ecological time of the highly unstable Hooghly river, with temporal demands of the international shipping trade, with the rhythms of bureaucratic decision making, and with the temporal affordances of predictive shipping technology. The mastery of ship navigation mediates between them, as river pilots attempt to reconcile ultimately incommensurable temporal rhythms through a slowly acquired art of navigation. Doing so is increasingly difficult in times of a cost-cutting public sector, which raises the risk of accidents. If a ship runs ashore, the accident may be understood in terms of the pilot’s lack of experience, and result in individual punishment and stigma. Yet, navigation is much more than an individual act. It is an attempt to balance the heterogenous times of capitalism (Bear 2016) with the temporalities of bureaucracy, infrastructure, and the natural world.

Other examples of the fruitful interplay of temporal multiplicities comes from studies of highly financialised environments where stockbrokers draw on global time differences between stock exchanges in, for example, Tokyo, Chicago, and London (Miyazaki 2003; Zaloom 2006). The same commodity—such as grain and its futures —may have its prices fluctuating differently in these different stock exchanges. Commodity futures can themselves be seen as different temporal states, the trade of which can drive markets up or lead to market crises (Stout 2016). Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that ‘time is money’ (Weber [1905] 1992, 14-16) applies, as some ethnographies demonstrate, even to the temporal difference between offices within the same global company. When headquarters in the West go to work, regional offices in an Eastern time zone may face pressure, and hierarchical exchange relations between them may mean that work time in the East spills over to ‘private’ home time (Karasyeva and Momzikova 2019). Within many financialised companies, the speed of work becomes a commodity in and of itself, both in face-to-face exchange, in screen-based trade (Zaloom 2006), and in the work of management consultants, frequently hired to speed up corporate activity (Stein 2017; 2018). In these contexts, work speed drives upward mobility and constitutes the social capital of ‘go-getters’ in banks and other corporations (Chelcea 2015; Ho 2009).

Conclusion: Time and the Anthropocene

The anthropology of time has provided us with rich insight into the different ways in which humans make sense of time, into how temporal multiplicities coexist and compete with one another, and into how anthropological research must be aware of its own temporal assumptions. One of the futures of the anthropology of time is in addressing the ecological insecurities of the Anthropocene. For instance, Lukas Ley’s recent ethnography charts rising ocean levels that affect the urban landscape in Semarang, central Java, where housing and urban infrastructure are being built on ‘borrowed time’ (Ley 2021). A similarly temporal sense of urgency to ‘think like a climate’ explores new motivations to use energy efficient housing which may shield its inhabitants from a climate-insecure future (Knox 2020). The Anthropocene compels us to think from the point of view of ‘deep time’ (Irvine 2020) that refers to long-term temporality of Earth as a planet. We need to compare conflicting temporal scales of geological time and the temporal dangers of capitalist extraction, production, and consumption (Chakrabarty 2018; Povinelli 2016). Capitalist time frequently works through the ‘evacuation of the near future’ (Guyer 2007) which includes creating incentives to consume now and to generate new forms of debt that one might repay later, but which one might also try to refinance and defer perpetually. The risks of human impact on the climate signal that this ‘evacuation of the near future’ may itself be evacuated. The Anthropocene invites ‘critical thinking … across some of the divisions that existed before’ (Haraway at al. 2016, 541; Moore 2016; Mathews 2020; Chakrabarty 2018). However, it also foregrounds its own secular and singular and true meaning of time over other temporal multiplicities if they are used to deny the risks of ongoing climate change. The possibility of human decline challenges us to consider not just the time of our lifespans but also the greater finality of human life and human time, no matter how it is culturally conceived.

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Note on contributor

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg. His publications include books: The social life of the state in Subarctic Siberia (2003, Stanford University Press) and Two Lenins: A brief anthropology of time (2017, HAU Malinowski Monographs), and articles: “Rethinking performativity: Ethnographic conceptualism” (2020, Journal of Cultural Economy); “Reassembling history and anthropology in Russian anthropology” (2019, Social Anthropology); “Hybrid peace: Ethnographies of war” (2018, Annual Review of Anthropology). He edited the exhibition catalogue Gifts to Soviet leaders (2006, Kremlin Museum) and a “Forum on the New Far Right” (2021, Social Anthropology).

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Finance

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

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

Daromir Rudnyckyj

University of Victoria

Initially published 7 Feb 2025

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Contextualising anthropological scholarship

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embodied finance and the reflexivity of financial knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

Representational effects and decentring numerical calculation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subject formation and the reproduction of norms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Note

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

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Note on contributor

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

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

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Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Commodity and supply chains

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 20:31:24 +0000

Dried chillies are loaded on a truck to send them to further processing in Sindhanur, Raichur district, Karnataka, India. Picture by Rakesh Sahai, Asian Development Bank, 2015.

Dagna Rams

London School of Economics

Initially published 19 Dec 2024

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

Abstract:

The global circulation of goods connects economic processes worldwide—from extraction and production to distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. The resultant web of economic activity means that cultures and places around the world have become interdependent. People’s desires in one place organise work and landscapes elsewhere; seamless flows of goods create new infrastructures; and places become united by an exchange of commodities and differentiated by the unequal distribution of profit and power. Anthropologists have traced these connections by following commodities along their international journeys, conducting fieldwork at crucial nodes like international ports. They have examined how global forces interact with local economies and vice versa. Through elaborating concepts like ‘commodity chains’, ‘supply chains’, ‘global networks’ or ‘the social life of things’, they have revealed legacies of global inequality, cultural exchange, trade infrastructures, and their impacts on environments and lives. Anthropologists have shown that global flows of goods and services are more than a simple correlation of supply and demand or a mere opportunity for economies to grow. Rather, they represent rich sites in which values of people, places, and things are negotiated, and where relationships of inequality are created, maintained, or undermined.

Introduction

The global circulation of goods weaves local work and raw materials together into the vast tapestry of the global economy. Food grown in one place may feed a stomach many kilometres away. Producers of consumer goods cater to the tastes of people they have never met. Any sudden local process—an ecological disruption, a change in state regulation, skyrocketing demand—can have effects far beyond its locality. Yet, people joined by this global exchange rarely share the same political institutions, landscapes, or the power to define how profits get distributed. As geographic distance and socio-cultural differences hide actors from one another, anthropological research uncovers the interdependencies between capital, labour, and consumers. It shows how the global economy creates room for unchecked accumulation, exploitation, misrepresentation, and delusion about planetary futures.

To represent these global webs, anthropologists and other social sciences have used different terms: ‘commodity chains’, ‘supply chains’, ‘commodity ecumene’, ‘the social life of things’. Each builds on a different intellectual tradition. ‘Commodity chains’ describe a sequential transformation of raw materials into consumer products through the stages of extraction, refinement, distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. Such chains, once mapped onto the world, represent a regional division of labour, often derived from colonial legacies in which (former) colonies supply raw materials to the metropoles (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986). Meanwhile, economic fluctuations—expansions or contractions— are due to the interdependence between various locales, rather than isolated state-level reforms. ‘Supply chain’ in turn is a management term to describe networks of suppliers and distributors working together across distance to increase efficiency and reduce cost. Focusing on supply chains foregrounds developments in logistics such as tracking systems and legal arrangements such as contracts between business partners. They enable economies of scale. The terms ‘commodity ecumene’ and ‘the social life of things’ are anthropological concepts that emphasise the rich cultural life of economic exchanges, where value attached to things is not solely an expression of economic laws but of cultures of valuation (Appadurai 1986). Sometimes used interchangeably, all of these terms draw attention to various qualities brought by the exchange of things across distance and difference. In using any one of them, researchers might emphasise the sequential nature of commodity exchange from extraction to consumption and the unequal distribution of power and capital across the commodity chains, the infrastructures that facilitate global flows and create profits out of ‘location advantage’ within supply chains, or the emergence of value and meanings as objects and social practices lead their social lives.^{^[1]}

Anthropologists are not the only social scientists to take interest in the circulation of goods. Other disciplines have been interested in mapping global commodity and supply chains in order to compare different forms of their governance (Bair 2005). Likewise, they asked questions about the relative importance of national policy vis-a-vis the country’s position in the commodity chain (Gereffi 1996; Bair 2005; Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon 2005). Compared to these approaches, anthropology’s distinct method of fieldwork has allowed us to observe global exchanges as rich sites of human encounters. Anthropologists have worked in locations consequential to the global circulation of goods such as borders or ports (Chalfin 2010), places marked by global economic connections such as American towns where pigs are slaughtered to meet mass demand (Blanchette 2020) or in the Congolese rainforest where labourers search for cobalt to power electronics (Smith 2022). Anthropologists have also followed commodities like coffee or mushrooms around the world to understand how far these exchanges connect or disconnect people and places (West 2012; Tsing 2015).

Power and inequality

Classical and neoclassical economic theories consider global trade to be a driver of prosperity and the efficient allocation of resources. They foreground how trade overcomes the whims of seasons, the limitations of regional soils, and differences in talent to meet needs and desires at an unprecedented scale. Seminal economic theorists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo in the late eighteenth century, and Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman in the early twentieth, formulated such laudatory views of global trade during various phases of imperial and colonial expansion and yet their works paid little attention to the resource exploitation and purposeful underdevelopment of the colonies.

Contrastingly, critical perspectives in history, political economy, and anthropology sought to centre the (post-)colonial experience, challenging the notion that the global marketplace is a realm of nations trading their advantages and surpluses according to free and equal exchange. These genealogies highlight the violent histories of extraction, compelled labour, and landscape devastation. With key references like The Black Jacobins (James 1938), Capitalism and slavery (Williams 1944) and The Negro in the French Revolution (DuBois 1962), this intellectual lineage locates the origins of global capitalism not in Western Europe but in its colonies, notably the Caribbean islands—conquered and settled for cash crops and worked by slave labour. These authors focus on how profits from plantations in the Caribbean fuelled wealth in the metropoles, establishing fortunes that developed Britain’s ports and factories, for example. They emphasise that development in one place and under-development in another, and the wealth of some and deprivation of others, are concurrent processes. And, moreover, the reason why they had not been viewed as such is due to racialising ideologies that see underdevelopment as a mostly inherent failure to advance rather than an exogenous effect of political intentions and structures.

One of the texts that inaugurated anthropological interest in commodity and supply chains is Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history (1985), a historical study of the sugar trade from the Caribbean to the European metropoles—linking ‘the Enslaved Africans who produced [sugar]’ and ‘the British labouring people who were learning to eat it’ (175). Sugar gave rise to radically different political economies and social lives—plantations and toil versus a consumer good providing a moment of sweetness at the end of a long workday. Rather than being an abstract phenomenon, Mintz shows that the sugar trade shapes bodies and tastes on both sides of the Atlantic. His study was not only a proposition about how commodities connect places whilst disconnecting economic regimes and human experience; it also suggested a new disciplinary approach. The anthropological interlocutor was no longer someone leading a remote and culturally particular life, but rather an actor from whose labour anthropologists and audiences of their work had long been profiting. Through existing commodity and supply chains, the researchers and interlocutors are already in a relationship—a relationship often premised on a fundamental inequality in which one side gets the short end of the stick.

Further inquiries sprang out of this early work. Some of them asked whether imperial and colonial divisions of the world into zones of production in the ‘peripheries’, and zones of consumption in the ‘metropoles’, still mattered. A crucial reminder of this past is that not all economic actors today have the same power to benefit from the global marketplace, possess enough capital to direct the flows of goods, or indeed even perceive the market’s actual breath and width: not least because not all people have the same power to move around the world or access basic banking services, or make use of credit. Addressing this gap, anthropologists have positioned their fieldwork at different ends of the hierarchy of economic power and profit—fleshing out the processes that create a ‘divide’ between the Global South and North (Hickel 2017). They have followed both multinational companies with international presence and influence, as well as small-scale producers and labourers in plantations and industries who, while connected to global flows, have little power to negotiate prices or work conditions.

Some works have looked at the enduring nature of global divisions into producers and consumers, noting that people in the Global South rarely get to be considered consumers in the first place (Freidberg 2004). What’s more, it is often consumers and distributors in the Global North that define the terms of producers’ inclusion in global capitalism. Susanne Freidberg (2004), for example, compares Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial commodity and supply chains in green beans. She focuses on connections between Zambia and the United Kingdom on the one hand, and Burkina Faso and France, on the other. British supermarkets required their Zambian partners to follow auditing and certification standards that effectively advantage white entrepreneurs who are familiar with British norms and able to pay for audits. In comparison, French buyers were more appreciative of the skills of Burkinabe farmers, yet their appreciation was not reflected in price, as Burkinabe farmers, just like their Zambian counterparts, had lower profit margins than distributors in Europe.

Typically, states positioned in the first node of commodity and supply chains—that is, specialising in natural resource extraction and agriculture—struggle to ‘add value’ to their production, remaining dependent on slim profit margins and precarious terms of trade. Anthropologists bring attention to the various mechanisms that maintain such a state of affairs. Following metals across commodity and supply chains, for example, highlights the importance of places like Switzerland where favourable tax regimes, lax corporate regulations, and the power of banks and investment companies enable trading companies to buy and sell commodities around the world (Dobler and Kesselring 2019). Outwardly, they connect global demand and supply, yet in doing so they also render specific places substitutable and disposable. Thus, for example, when Zambia increased electricity rates for its foreign-owned copper mines, Swiss trading companies temporarily stopped operations, substituting their quotas with copper sourced elsewhere (Kesselring 2017).

This economic inequality pokes holes in capitalist notions of economic exchange as being voluntary or equal. Markets do not only deepen colonial inequality, but rather ‘they are made by that inequality’ (Appel 2020, 2). US oil companies, for example, are able to make substantial profits in Equatorial Guinea, a country run by an authoritarian government where the majority of the population lives in poverty. Arrangements that sell raw materials at marked-down prices are sealed by contracts between ‘states’ and ‘companies’— abstract concepts that ‘[mask] the “specific” parties who, in fact, sign the contract’ (Appel 2020, 145). Symbolising legality, such contracts are invoked to halt debates about whether or not profits are shared equitably. They obfuscate that the involved parties are fundamentally different: while states answer to citizens to meet their fundamental needs, many companies work for shareholders to increase their wealth. Power differentials between underfunded states and much wealthier companies can be staggering. In such situations, government workers, though supposedly representing their citizens, can see their job as ‘making things easy’ for the company in order to provide a ‘better business environment’ than other countries in the region (Appel 2020, 157).

Scholarship has questioned the extent to which the colonial and postcolonial structures limit entrepreneurial agency. Openings for breaking free from economic constraints have been described as ‘motion in the system’ (Trouillot 1982). Such motion may mean the relative ability to choose business partners and negotiate prices, acquire reliable market information, and accumulate enough capital to invest into projects that shape political and social institutions. ‘Motion in the system’ could be found in both colonial and postcolonial circumstances. For example, gens de colour, descendants of interracial couplings in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), were able to corner the market for coffee by growing it in mountainous and inaccessible areas that white settlers shied away from (Trouillot 1982). Whilst initially a niche product, coffee grew in importance amid the eighteenth century anti-British sentiment in North America which affected sales of British-controlled tea. These climatic and geopolitical circumstances created openings for new mixed-raced entrepreneurs. In a different historical moment and geographic place, the bifurcation of the shea market in postcolonial Ghana into export and domestic markets meant that female shea producers and market women in the West African country’s savannah were less beholden to exporters’ expectations as they could rely on domestic demand to sell their produce (Chalfin 2003; 2004). What’s more, they could off-load lower quality shea onto exporters, leaving better nuts for their local base and greater certainty in negotiating prices.

Important recent interventions in commodity and supply chains that anthropologists are following are fair trade schemes promising to improve labour conditions. Fair trade schemes principally imagine change as occurring on the level of contracts between individual producers and buyers, rather than on the level of international terms of trade, treaties, or international producer alliances (Besky 2014; West 2012). In consequence, they have been criticised for favouring established and richer producers, who have the financial and cultural capital to enter fair trade certification schemes (Besky 2014; Fischer 2022). Fair trade schemes also rely on a generalised context of unsustainable and exploitative modes of production from which fair trade participants are the honourable exception (West 2012). Sometimes, fair trade schemes even obfuscate larger socio-political structures that influence the lives of labourers. For example, Darjeeling tea plantations in India are certified as ‘fair trade’ based on small-scale interventions that aim to ‘empower’ workers through micro-loans (Besky 2014). Such interventions aim to soften the otherwise tough and unequal reality of plantation work as a largely immutable economic form, complete with impermeable social hierarchies. Plantations are here recast as a way of life, rather than a system of exploitation, and workers’ identities are fetishised with romantic images of working hands obfuscating injurious conditions of bonded labour. The grinding aspects of this labour are put on display in the photography collection Dark garden by Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq, for example, where the artist documents the influence of pesticides on workers’ eyes and the disfigurement of hands from the work of plucking leaves.^{^[2]}

Infrastructures of connection

The focus on commodity and supply chains may strike some readers as limiting. It tends to privilege a sequential transformation of commodities, and presumes a linear accruement of value along postcolonial economic divides. Others also critique some of the scholarship for not paying attention to the actual processes of chain-making (Caliskan 2011). Therefore, researchers have also studied international economic exchange beyond colonial and postcolonial geographies and frameworks. They have followed, for example, trade between Asia and the rest of the world and exchanges in the context of South-South relations (Dirlik 2007). They also have looked at the multitude of actors such as distributors, brokers, and exchanges that weave the global web of production, consumption, and discarding. Such new approaches build on the basic insights of the previous literature, namely that the global economy is interdependent, but they equally show that global connections are non-linear, multi-directional, actively constructed, and reconstructed.

The recent anthropological theorising along these lines has emerged from closer scrutiny of the term ‘supply chain’, which describes networks of suppliers and distributors working together across distances with the aim of increasing the efficiency of production while reducing its costs. Two types of supply chains are common—buyer-driven or supplier-driven—in which firms with superior capital and power organise traffic in commodities through buying components from suppliers or supplying goods and services to a range of distributors. These byzantine arrangements mean that identifying ‘lead firms’ and understanding the nature of relations between actors in these chains can be akin to detective work. A vivid example of this is the production of seatbelts for American cars with ‘fibres manufactured in Mexico, woven and dyed in Canada to take advantage of the abundance of water, sent back to Mexico to be sewn up, and then installed somewhere at a plant in the United States’ (Klein and Pettis 2020, 28).

Commodity and supply chains embody the ‘bigness’ of global capitalism (Tsing 2008). Through ‘outsourcing’ (i.e. contracting suppliers for goods and services) and ‘vertical integration’ (i.e. taking ownership of key stages of a supply chain), they incorporate heterogeneity. These chains are instrumental in understanding the simultaneous increase in global standardisation and the growing inequalities of contemporary capitalism. Lead firms ensure that commodities meet uniform health and safety standards enforced through auditing checks. While outsourcing is justified by economies of scale and specialisation, it often relies on differences in regulation and labour conditions to make goods cheaper. This can maintain or exacerbate inequalities between people across the difference of class, race, culture, and the North-South divide. A key process here is ‘salvage accumulation’ (Tsing 2008); that is, profiting from skills, competences, and forces existing outside capitalist exchange, for example a company making profits from cheap labour motivated by an appeal to Christian work ethics (Tsing 2008). While primarily serving as a basis for exploitation, heterogeneity within supply chains can also function as a source of contestation. Encounters within supply chains may generate or maintain different values, ideas of utility, or philosophies of labour (Bear et al. 2015). For example, Asian refugees scavenging for mushrooms in US forests may choose such a livelihood because it provides them with a sense of freedom and a connection to nature (Tsing 2015).

Outsourcing is a crucial mechanism for extending the global economy. International companies strategically locate their factories across Asia and Latin America, capitalising on cheap labour and lax regulations. The global supply chains have intensified due to trade developments, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and India's economic liberalisation in the 1990s. Anthropological studies conducted in factories across India, Mexico, and East Asia illuminate the human costs associated with these regions' transformations into global hubs of cheap and flexible labour. Indian consultancies, for example, now recruit and ‘bench’ labour on a short-term project basis, effectively relying on workers' rural kin to sustain them during periods of unemployment (Xiang 2007). Anthropologists have also traced the psychic imprint of trade liberalisation, which cast some regions as powerhouses of efficient and just-in-time production. Malay women who are employed in factories serving the global market, for example, are trapped between patriarchal management and demanding production quotas (Ong 1987). One ethnographic study showed that in the 1980s, these women frequently suffered from spirit possessions, which could be seen as a form of resistance, allowing women to channel rage and secure time off (Ong 1987). Such spirit possessions can be seen to reveal workers' contestations of oppressive outsourcing structures.

While the differentiation of labour can be grounded in outwardly racist or sexist ideologies (see Robinson 1983; Wynter 2003), contemporary managerial thought and practice tends to hold that a differentiated valuation of labour in global supply chains is the an outcome of economic policy, education, skills, and aptitude. As anthropologist Anna Tsing emphasises, ‘no firm has to personally invent patriarchy, colonialism, war, racism or imprisonment, yet each of these is privileged in supply chain labour mobilisation’ (2009, 151). In tune with this insight, anthropologists frequently reveal that differences between people are in fact the building blocks of profitability. Practices like ‘outsourcing in place’, whereby companies such as food delivery apps or hotels rely principally on migrants (Terray 1999) and ‘global care chains’, which stretch care work across national boundaries (Perreñas 2001), rely on precarious migrant workers to make up for the fact that in some sectors simply moving jobs abroad is not possible. The qualities of these workers—their gender, dependence on host families, having constraint options on the labour market, perceived docility, etc.—make them akin to the housewives and servants they have come to replace (see Ehrenreich and Hochchild 2004). Meanwhile, a common justification used by managers in Asian factories for underpaying female workforce is that the women are supplementary, and not primary, household earners. In this way, households are exploited for their kinship resources and their ability to provide psychological support to members (Dunaway 2001).

Anthropologists also examine the infrastructures that hold commodity and supply chains together. Commodity and supply chains can also be seen as infrastructures in their own right, often painstakingly created to ensure a smooth circulation of goods and services. Recently, anthropologists have scrutinised their global architecture by focusing on the actual material pathways taken and created by ships, containers, ports, and technologies that track the passage of goods (Chalfin 2010; Chu et al. 2020; Leivestad and Schober 2021). Such research also looks at how this global architecture creates inflection points around the world, such as at the Suez Canal, which has an outsized influence on global trade with any risks contained by militarised infrastructure (Cowen 2014). This shifts a conversation from commodity and supply chains as markets for the satisfaction of consumer needs and desires to considerations about supply chains as linked to survival, security, and military power.

People, exchange, and value

Global exchanges are rich sites of valuation. They can be teased apart not solely on the macro scale of global processes but also the micro scale of cross-cultural encounters between individuals and communities. To explore how exchange relates to value, anthropological researchers have drawn attention to the work of brokers, distributors, tastemakers, and experts; that is, all sorts of people who do not strictly produce commodities but rather make them accessible, meaningful, and valuable to consumers. Such intermediaries impart value on the exchange because of their social and cultural capital. For example, American mineral traders are able to negotiate higher prices compared to their Mexican counterparts as their expertise is more trusted and they are able to access markets in the US from which the others are excluded (Ferry 2013).

As global markets promote standardisation of commodities to make them commensurable, that very standardisation can also increase the power of middlemen. Coffee beans from Papua New Guinea, for example, were sold for $12.95 USD per pound in 2000s and yet the labour involved in producing them was remunerated at 0.33 USD per pound (West 2012, 16). Though there is no coffee without farmers, the standardisation of beans makes coffees from around the world substitutable for each other which in turn increases the value of creating distinction through branding, including storytelling. Coffee producers compete with each other on a market in which tastemakers, marketing agencies, and designers take the greater cut. What’s more, it is precisely the narrative of Papuans’ poverty and assumed ‘primitiveness’ that casts buying Papuan coffee as an aide to its growers, implying that ‘any money [the farmers] make is a vast improvement over their prior-to-capital lives’ (West 2012, 248). In a similar manner, the so-called Third Wave coffee—a coffee movement that emphasises quality, sourcing beans from individual farmers, and roasting to obtain distinct flavours—rewards those growers that are capable of ‘setting the terms for cultural narratives of [coffee’s] worth’ (Fischer 2022, 204).

Non-corporate middlemen and brokers act as agents of globalisation, connecting actors and places and exchanging across difference. Their work can be seen as enacting globalisation from ‘below’ as they extend distribution or source goods in a wide variety of places outside established networks that are already controlled by corporations and their licensed business partners (Matthews, Ribeiro and Alba Vega 2012). Because of the informal nature of such nascent networks, they become grounds for innovating cultures of trust, relations of credit and debt, and new technologies of pricing (Curtin 1984; Trivellato 2009). Such emerging commodity and supply chains include Chinese and Indigenous traders distributing cheap goods across Latin America (Pinheiro-Machado 2017). Here, brokers act as translators who appropriate foreign commodities for local markets, accessing places off-the-beaten infrastructure that companies may not have any proprietary market research about (Müller 2024).

These connections forge new models of creativity and partaking in the global economy. Asian manufacturing industries, for example, are contracted by African entrepreneurs to produce consumer goods responding to African tastes. In fact, much of the traditional West African wax cloth is now produced in China. Such trade connections are powered by, among others, the so-called Nanettes in Togo, a younger generation of women who hitherto lacked the capital to trade with companies located in Europe but are able to pioneer new exchanges with Asia (Sylvanus 2016). In a similar context, Igbo importers of foreign goods to Nigeria move between their home country, China, and the Middle East to source commodities and ship them to customers in West Africa. Every step of this inter-regional value chain has its own risks. Unlike multinational companies that rely on market research, established legal frameworks, or a regulated banking systems, Igbo entrepreneurs have to rely on mostly self-organised traders’ associations. To minimise risk, Nigerian traders curate containers sent from Asai, filling them with a great variety of goods. Once in Nigeria, they fight to seal their distribution networks from foreign competitors—especially as the latter have market advantages, such as access to foreign low-interest credit (Lu 2022).

Distributors not only reach consumers, but they are also powerful agents in the sourcing of commodities outside formal networks or the purview of corporations. People can forge connections to the global economy in the ruins of old commodity and supply chains or under the radar of the law as is the case for all sorts of pirates. Interrogating livelihoods forged in the ruins or in ‘grey zones’, as anthropologists have done, is a crucial counterpoint to the tropes of capitalist promise-making or state planning. In South Africa, for example, men searching for gold inside disused mines are known as zama zamas. They are often migrants and considered particularly ‘tough’ due to a lack of other economic options (Morris 2022). They descend into the mines to search for remaining sparse gold deposits. With death underground being a perceptible threat, days can go by until a sufficient amount of the ore is gathered. Shadowy middlemen then buy these finds, paying in cash, with zama zamas knowing as little about the buyers as their phone numbers. Here, migration, mining, and international commodity and supply chains work together, to create both a vague sense of opportunity and violent actual precarity.

Disembedding the environment

Similar to market economies becoming disembedded from social relations (Polyani 1944), the global circulation of goods and services arguably disembeds economic activities from local environments and labour. Commodity and supply chains hide consumers and producers from one another, heightening commodity fetishism, i.e. the mistaken belief that commodities exist independently of social relations. Relocating production to other regions means that consumers and investors may not experience or appreciate how their consumption affects natural environments. Urban economies in the Global North tend to specialise in research and development, finance, technology, and creative industries. Such ‘third sectors’ are heavily reliant on raw materials and invisibilised labour, but actors within them might see the global economy as a space of immaterial ideas, creativity, and innovation. This has psychic consequences: their ideas take shape in the material world, while they themselves do not have to attend to the material conditions and consequences of those ideas. Awareness about global commodity and supply chains corrects such anti-material bias. For example, the extraction of cobalt in the Congo is a crucial ingredient of cutting-edge electronics. Being blind to the inconvenient fact of cobalt mining’s pressure on the environment risks third sector actors sliding into a ‘self-congratulatory techno-utopianism’ of Silicon Valley, which often casts itself as singularly responsible for technological advances whilst remaining oblivious to its ecological consequences (Smith 2021).

Ecological considerations also matter when given that global commodity and supply chains have been crucial for realising economies of scale. As such, they raise questions about the ‘politics of scale’, i.e. the choices needed to achieve economies of scale (Blanchette 2020) and about ‘de-growth’, which is a broad proposition to create economies that are mindful of nature’s limits (Livingston 2019; Hickel 2021). While economies of scale have enabled cheapness, they rely on things, labour, and land that are not straightforwardly scalable. As such, economies of scale are experiments with profound environmental consequences. Producing cheap pork (as well as by-products such as pet food, methane gas, and gelatine) in a town in the US Midwest, for example, requires killing a pig every three seconds (Blanchette 2020). The companies that produce pork at scale replace individual pigs, capricious animals marked by idiosyncrasies, into ‘the pig’: a predictable commodity that enables calculating costs and profits. The latter requires interfering with pigs’ bodies, including adjusting sows’ reproductive drive and fertility through hormone therapy. Meanwhile, dealing with extraordinary events, such as a sudden death of thusly modified sows and their piglets, falls onto the shoulders of an undervalued workforce, who may find themselves needing to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on dying piglets (Blanchette 2020, 153).

Economies of scale are not just corporate policy; they are also promoted by states as ways to attain economic growth. They represent a ‘self-devouring’ drive to produce evermore while in the long term undermining the very conditions of production, like access to clean water and fertile land (Livingston 2019). In Botswana, for example, cattle, which used to be appreciated in poetry, prayer, and ritual, are turned into a mere ‘techno-economic’ objects as part of mass beef production. Among the Tswana people of Botswana, cattle used to represent the family, was only killed towards the end of its life, and the resultant beef was ritually divided between its members. Industrial beef production, on the other hand, calls for higher levels of consumption to perpetuate higher levels of production and evacuates questions about nature into the future.

The study of commodity and supply chains has recently been complemented by anthropologists’ increased attention to more-than-human worlds. The production and consumption regimes that commodity and supply chains enable are not just violent to the environment, but also such violence can be displayed by the physical matter, such as oil palm trees, that they unleash onto the world. In villages of the Papua province of Indonesia, for example, Marind people witness how oil palms ravage biodiversity and landscapes (Chao 2022). They see their world become hostage to a quickly spreading plant that ‘kills the sago, murders their kin, chokes the rivers, and bleeds their land’ (Chao 2022, 11). Palm in these cosmologies has its own distinct, more-than-human agency and becomes a target of resistance. Here, the plantations are contact zones between the locals’ lifeworlds, based on the cultivation of sago, and agro-industrial capitalism which relies on palm as a plant suitable for economies of scale and useable across different foodstuffs.

Meanwhile, economies of scale create waste at a level that may be reaching its global ‘apotheosis’ (Hecht 2018). Landfills and dumpsites can be thought of as nodes in supply chains, even more so in the context of emerging circular economies that promise to recast waste as a raw material for production (O’Hare and Rams 2024). Acting as places in which waste is temporarily stored away and managed, they contribute to the status quo of overproduction (Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022). Beyond these localised waste sites, research also points to substantive movements of waste to the Global South as second-hand products. As such, consumers in these parts of the world both rely on and are inundated by waste-laden second-hand imports of electronics, clothes, cars, and other consumer products from Western countries. Such second-hand economies contribute to local environmental damage as they surpass the capacity of local waste infrastructures. While second-hand markets create economic opportunities for traders and provide choices to consumers, these benefits are complicated by the way second-hand buyers may feel lesser than consumers in the Global North who can afford new goods (Burrell 2012).^[3]

Economies of scale and their impact on the environment have met resistance. Anthropologists document the ways in which people practice opposition to what some have called ‘plantationocene’ or ‘capitalocene’, terms proposed as historically and contextually situated modifications of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to emphasise that the responsibility for planetary damage is unevenly distributed (Haraway 2016; Sapp Moore and Arosoaie 2022). They have explored histories of cooperative farming adhering to notions of wellness and self-reliance and thus away from capitalist models that promote reliance on food produced elsewhere (Reese 2019; White 2018). Anthropologists have also focused on examples of human and more-than-human resistance to mono-crops and their scalar logic (Beilin and Suryanarayanan 2017). Such works also document human resistance to projects of extraction in which ordinary people can be seen to disrupt extractive infrastructures such as pipes and expose their fragility (Mitchell 2013).

Conclusion

Anthropological scholarship explains some of the confusing and uneasy aspects of global commodity and supply chains: how they connect people as commodities pass from one hand to another and yet disconnect them when it comes to distributing the resultant power, profit, and hazard; how they mobilise people across difference—speaking different languages, living across economic divides, perhaps espousing different values—whilst exploiting that very difference for profit-making; and how all this worldly architecture sinks into the background, seamlessly rearranging what people come to expect as their economies get divorced from the local soils and workforce. This is a crucial effort because some of the most common ways of thinking about global trade—in economic theories or policies of international organisations—see the trade as happening between nations that are free to choose policy or specialise economies to their advantage. Anthropologists show how this economic calculus makes assumptions about the worth of other humans and cultural beliefs that reflect long and on-going legacies of global inequality. The study of global circulation allows us to interrogate the connection between growth and ecological and cultural devastation, accumulation and dispossession, and profit and exploitation.

As we look into the future, a multitude of new perspectives and potential areas for research emerge, especially when it comes to integrating global commerce within environmental limits. The integration of a circular economy could fundamentally reshape geographies of resource circulation, possibly creating new relationships between waste and production. Elsewhere, some view the advent of blockchain and other digital technologies as having promise for transforming transparency and trust within global networks whilst creating new forms of value, for example by tying the labour of farmers to carbon trading (Barbato and Strong 2023). Simultaneously, there's a growing interest in localising production and shortening commodity and supply chains, a trend that might have profound implications for global markets as it spurs new communities organised around principles of relative self-sufficiency. Such interventions could entail redesigning commodity and supply chains in dialogue with the environment. Rich existing anthropological research already draws insights from Indigenous knowledge systems about, for example, mining traditions aware of ‘sharing’ resources with nature (D’Avignon 2023) or approaches to food that promote diversified cultivation and food access (Reese 2019). These approaches suggest multiple pathways forward for reimagining resource flows and human-environment relationships.

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Note on contributor

Dagna Rams is a Visiting Research Fellow based at London School of Economics (Department of Anthropology). Her research is sponsored by the post-doctoral mobility scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation. She has completed her doctoral fieldwork in scrapyards, e-waste sites, smelters, and metal buying companies in Ghana. Her post-doctoral fieldwork investigates how metal markets and technological companies conceive of metal supply and its sustainability, and factor those considerations into their operations. The research speaks to her interest in the resource limitations to economic, environmental, and technological future-making.

^{^[1]} For reasons of simplicity, this entry will use the term ‘commodity and supply chains’ throughout.

^{^[2]} Fatiq, Md Fazla Rabbi. 2023. Dark garden. https://mdfazlarabbifatiq.com/dark-garden/

^{^[3]} See also Kolade, Bobby, and Nikissi Serumaga. 2021. Vintage or Violence Podcast. https://www.vintageorviolence.com/

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Energy

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

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

Katja Müller

Merseburg University for Applied Sciences

Initially published 5 Nov 2024

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Power and politics

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

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

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

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

Energy transitions and conflict

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

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

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

Energy’s meanings and materialities

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forms and materialisations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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Note on contributor

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

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United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 2024. Process and meetings: The Rio Conventions. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-rio-conventions. Accessed 29 May 2024.

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

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

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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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

Social reproduction

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

Hadas Weiss

Initially published 25 Sep 2021

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Marxian origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feminist interventions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crisis and financialisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inequality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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Note on contributor

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

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

Farming

Felix Stein — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 11:23:31 +0000

Andrew Ofstehage

Cornell University

Initially published 23 Jan 2020

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

Abstract:

Farming has become increasingly visible in recent years, following a growing public interest in how food is produced. Anthropologists have been studying farming since the founding of the discipline. This entry summarises the origins of farming and agricultural intensification before analysing three themes of the social anthropology of farming. First, farming is dependent on relations of power and capital. Second, farming is deeply engaged with social relations of value, race, and gender. Third, farming has a deep engagement with the physical environment in ways that are generative and relational. New themes in the anthropology of farming include a focus on farm workers and the question of how farming fits into three theories of epochal planetary change in which the dominant influences on the environment and climate are human activity, capital, and plantation agriculture.

Introduction

Food and agriculture are a central and sustaining element of human life both physiologically and socially. Agriculture has also had a major environmental impact. It has transformed much of the U.S. Great Plains and Brazilian Cerrado into fields of grain, and is at least partially to blame for wildfires that threaten the Amazon rainforest and West Papuan forests. It follows that farming has maintained a place of focus within socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology. The root of the term ‘farmer’ is ‘one who collects taxes’ and other duties, and ‘farm’ originally referred to a total rent payment (Donald 1867), but farming is broadly defined as the process of doing agriculture and animal husbandry. It includes the cultivation of plants and the raising of livestock for food, feed, fibre, and sometimes fuel. Academics make sense of farming in different ways. Agronomists often study conservation and how to maximise food production. Economists frequently ask themselves how farmers respond to markets, incentives, and costs. Rural sociologists and anthropologists tend to focus on the meanings and relationships of farming. Historically, anthropologists have focused on non-Western, pre-industrial societies, and sociologists on Western, industrial settings, though scholars from both disciplines have blurred these lines. Anthropologists continue to centre on meaning and relationships, but also ask holistically how markets and capital, the physical environment, and social meaning all come together.

Agricultural cultivation is a co-dependent process that involves humans, plants, soils, and animals. It drives and complements systems of exchange, whether through market exchange at farmers markets, large-scale commodity sales and barter, or reciprocal gift exchange between neighbours and within communities. It depends on social relationships with business partners, kin, farm workers, and neighbours. Even seemingly anonymous global soy markets, involving large-scale farmers and multinational agribusinesses, often depend on the trust-based exchange of commodities for agricultural inputs (Wesz Jr. 2014). Farming also modifies plants and animals through domestication and transforms landscapes and soils. It is done both at the scale of local ecologies and communities and at the scale of national agricultural policies and global markets. For reasons of simplicity, this entry divides this multiplicity of the anthropology of farming into three categories of study – the politics and economics of farming (including questions around power, work, and capital), its meaning and social values, and the socio-biological and socio-environmental aspects of farming and food.

Anthropology has always engaged with agrarian people. Proponents of agricultural anthropology, i.e. the comparative, holistic, and cross-temporal study of human interactions with technology, ecologies, and society through agriculture, write that ‘[v]irtually every manifestation of agriculture ranging from shifting cultivation to modern industrial farming has been subject to anthropological study’ (Rhoades & Rhoades 1980: 10). Anthropologists tend not to study agriculture in isolation. Even the most technologically-advanced and capital-intensive farming systems are situated in environments of soil, water, and light as well as in social relationships. Thus, anthropologists tend to build on a holistic view of farming, which allows them to understand farmers and farm communities in a way that highlights their relations with plants and soil, markets and reciprocal exchange networks, and society and state.

Today, fewer and fewer people are directly involved in agriculture. In the United States, economic output from agriculture as a sector leads only educational services and arts, entertainment, and recreation.^[1]lThe global economic transition from farm work to industrial wage labour is driven by the global integration of markets and migration networks (Nash 1994) as well as rising agricultural productivity and mechanization that increase labour productivity and reduce labour demand for farming (Janssen 2018). Yet we still see references to farming everywhere we look today. Talk show hosts and journalists tell us which ‘superfoods’ to eat and which kinds of food are exacerbating hunger in peasant communities (McDonell 2015); trips to the grocery store may include biographies and portraits of the farmers who grew the kumquats on display; popular television programs embed critiques of capitalist and industrial agriculture in their plots (Specht 2013); and we are invited to ‘vote with our money’ to transform broken food systems (Pollan 2006). As the author and activist Michael Pollan brought to the attention of many Western consumers, the foods we eat are increasingly abstracted from place, people, and even plants. A disconnect between consumers and farmers and a growing interest in how food is grown may thus go hand in hand. This distance has brought distrust, and thus consumers want to know if animals were mistreated, crops were genetically modified, or if their shopping list will threaten Indigenous communities or distant rainforests. This growing awareness and concern for food and farming have drawn renewed interest in the anthropological study of food and agriculture. Fortunately, the origins, expansion, and impacts of agriculture have been hotly debated by anthropologists since the founding of the discipline.

Origins of agriculture

With the first agricultural revolution around 12,000 years ago, humans began cultivating and raising their food. This period was also associated with sedentary lifestyles, an increasingly complex division of labour, and the development of art. Early studies of the origins and expansion of agriculture focused on the factors that led humans to shift livelihood strategies, in particular from a nomadic to more sedentary life. These studies focused on environmental factors, population pressure, and co-dependent plant, animal, and human interactions. Marginal Zone theory, for example, proposes that humans turned to agriculture when optimal zones for hunting and gathering could no longer support growing human populations (Binford 1968). Groups of people may have migrated to less abundant zones, where hunting and gathering were insufficient for their survival, and adopted agricultural production. Early animal husbandry may have begun when communities enclosed and fed animals that foraged in gardens (Linares 1976). Marginal Zone theory also suggests a mutual process of domestication that rendered humans and animals interdependent. Evolutionary models of agriculture similarly describe the co-dependency and co-evolution of people and plants as a relationship in which people gain a source of food and plants (Rindos 1984). Critics of Marginal Zone theory claim that it is environmentally deterministic and does not account for cultural and social factors such as power, leadership, or social institutions (Bender 1978; Hayden 1990). A ‘feasting model’ of domestication credits technological advancement (i.e. new fishing technologies, mass seed-collecting techniques, and practices of food processing and storage) for the origins of agriculture. These techniques may have enabled individuals to create a food surplus and then distribute the food strategically through feasts to gain prestige and power (Hayden 1990).

Anthropologists also ask how agriculture became intensive. Intensive agriculture tends to involve shorter fallow periods between crops, an increased use of labour (by humans or machines), and a more intensive use of other inputs such as seeds, fertilisers, or irrigation (Netting 1993). Some writers relate the intensification of agricultural production and animal domestication to a social evolutionary frame of human history. They may, for example, argue that the intensification of human-managed ecologies is a sign of cultural and technological progress (Childe & Daniel 1951). However, a more common approach in anthropology today is to ask how and why agriculture became intensive, without necessarily relating this to normative notions of societal progress. Agricultural communities may, for example, adapt intensive agricultural production strategies to feed growing populations, avoid famines, or respond to ecological constrains (Bruno 2014). Moreover, markets and state coercion have often induced farmers to intensify production, obliging them to shift towards cash crop production to improve household wellbeing (Finnis 2008) or to meet coercive state tribute or tax demands (Godoy 1984). Farmers’ capacity to increase production yields means that anthropologists have been sceptical of Malthusian theories postulating that overpopulation leads to famine (Boserup 1965).

Later work showed that agricultural intensification also depended on certain agro-ecological conditions (Stone & Downum 1999). For example, a region with low or highly variable precipitation or infertile soils may not merit intensification or agricultural production at all. Communities do not necessarily respond to food shortages by intensifying production when the local ecology cannot support intensive agriculture. Instead, they may respond through political action, such as limiting land access to specific ethnic or kin groups (Stone & Downum 1999). Neither is intensification of farming directly correlated with yield increases. In the late 1970s, Clifford Geertz developed the term ‘agricultural involution’ to describe the growing social complexity and intensification of human agricultural labour that comes under outside pressure. The term places social change at the intersection of agricultural change and political and economic environments (Geertz 1970). Geertz showed that, along with population growth, it was three centuries of Dutch colonialism (from the seventeenth century) and the introduction of new crops and technologies (i.e. transplanting, land preparation, and double cropping) which increased overall agricultural production in Indonesia. Yet, production continued to be labour-intensive and labour productivity remained stagnant. The notion of agricultural involution considers population density, colonialism, and technology together. Thereby it holistically describes the social and physical causes of agricultural intensification.

Regardless of the relative merits and pitfalls of intensification, farming communities may decline to pursue agricultural intensification. Swidden farmers in Indonesia, for example, carefully balance land, labour, and time as they apply their ‘unique knowledge of their environment and how to exploit it’ (Dove 1985: 384). Similarly, British colonial farming practices were not rejected by West African farmers out of ignorance, but out of a preference for their own agronomically-derived and tested practices (Richards 1985). Risk management, market incentives or lack thereof, and political and social structures all co-determine if families will pursue agricultural intensification (Stone 2001). State and colonial governments, for example, have pushed intensification through both the violent enforcement of colonial demands and semi-voluntary enrolment in green revolution agriculture, which began worldwide in the 1960s and consolidated in the 1970s (Franke 1974).

Relatedly, agriculture may seem to sit at the end of an evolution from hunting and gathering to pastoralism to farming, but people may choose to avoid agriculture and sedentism in favour of mobility and flexibility. Hunting and gathering communities can enjoy greater amounts of leisure time than farming communities (Sahlins 1972). Marshall Sahlins’ theory of the ‘original affluent society’ proposes that hunter-gatherers can satisfy their everyday needs without agriculture. They may eschew the benefits of intensive farming in favour of the lower labour demands that come with hunting and gathering. While the caloric output per person tends to be greater in farming communities, this involves trade-offs. Agricultural production requires more work, necessitates sedentary lifestyles, and often reduces nutritional diversity. Life without agriculture can demand less work per person and it can provide access to a diverse and nutritious diet (Lee 2017). Alternatives to sedentary agriculture also provide political benefits. Populations of farmers in the Highlands of Southeast Asia pursue mobile forms of farming to avoid state control (Scott 2010). The members of these mobile communities plant crops that require little care and can be left in the ground for long periods of time. They cultivate land that is difficult to access, but easy to find cover in. Using this style of ‘escape agriculture’, farmers may adapt their crops, labour, and fields to escape the state surveillance and control that settled, sedentary agricultural farming communities cannot avoid.

Agriculture is closely linked to the development of states and societies. In the Southern Moche State in the arid Moche Valley of Peru, agriculture depended heavily on irrigation systems – the control of which afforded a centralised, expansive state (Billman 2002). Extensification (or, the expansion of farmland area under cultivation) and intensification of agriculture in the Alps of Europe in 1000 AD required clearing forest to extend arable land and reducing the fallow period to intensify production. Both processes were directed by land-controlling elites who used the profits of increased production to consolidate their control of territory and people (Wolf 2010). Sociologists have similarly argued that agriculture reflects and guides the power of state systems in the present day (Friedman & McMichael 1989). Agriculture can increase the amount of calories produced per person and make sedentary life more viable, yet it also enables the control of society by states (Scott 2017).

The origins of agriculture, causes of intensification, and the relation between the rise of agriculture and the rise of states and societies are important milestones in human history. They tell us how we as a human race became who we are today. The way anthropologists debate and find evidence for these milestones also says a lot about the discipline as a whole. Anthropologists trace the comparative origins of agriculture to human processes of population growth and migration in industrial and agrarian societies, but also to non-human processes in which plants and animals developed co-dependence with humans. Agricultural intensification is a response to population pressure but also to political pressure, and it always remains dependent on political developments as well as considerations of risk, value, and agro-ecologies. The following sections discuss three ways in which anthropologists engage with agriculture today: political economy, meaning-making in agriculture, and engagements with natural environments.

Political economy: power and capital

A key anthropological contribution to the study of farming is placing that activity within relations of power and capital. We see the importance of power in the origins and implications of agricultural intensification as well as in the everyday realities of farming today. Debates on the nature of agrarian change under capitalism, or the ‘agrarian question’, begin with Marx’s Capital (Marx & Engels 1967) and continue through the development of Marxist thought (see Kautsky 1988; Lenin 1964; Chayanov 1966). The agrarian question asks what happens to peasants and farmers in a capitalist economy. Karl Marx proposed two pathways for the peasantry: that they will eventually become wage labourers, or that they will become a collective political unit (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). The first pathway is largely a transition from peasantry into wage labour with a few landowners rising to a new ‘rural middle class’ and ‘completing the transition to a fully capitalist mode of production’ (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). The second pathway would be a gradual coalescence of peasants into a collective political unit of agricultural production on a national scale (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). Today the agrarian question tackles similar questions of how peasants and small farmers engage with and resist capital, but with greater attention to how these struggles intersect with other criteria such as gender and ecology (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010b).

Power and capital operate on different scales, from local communities to global commodity flows. Farming communities, for example, are shaped by the scale and type of agriculture practiced nearby. Large-scale, industrial farming has at times been associated with less vibrant forms of community life, centralised economic activity, and greater dependency on large capital providers and the political power of the state. Communities associated with small-scale, less capital-intensive farming tend to attract more diverse small businesses and may develop a richer community life (Goldschmidt 1978). That said, farming communities can also reinforce capitalist values of farming. During the 1980s US farm crisis, in which falling commodity prices and farm debt led to widespread farm foreclosures, neighbours blamed each other for falling into debt and losing their farms (Dudley 2002). Elsewhere during the same crisis, farmers often eschewed ‘traditional’ values of farming, such as land stewardship, deeply-held religious beliefs, and family-centred decision making, in favour of individualism and profitmaking (Barlett 1993). At a global scale, sugar creates relations of power and capital, linking Caribbean sugar plantations and the rise of industrial work in Europe. The early use of slave labour on sugar plantations and later exploitation of Caribbean farmworkers created cheap sugar, which in turn sustained a growing industrial working class in Great Britain (Mintz 1985). Importantly, while this entry focuses on farming, Sidney Mintz’ work shows the importance of considering food consumption and farming together.

We also see the impact and power of capital in terms of the essential means of agricultural production: seeds, labour, soil, and other inputs. Plant breeding in the Americas has culminated in a mostly undemocratic seed economy. Traditions of local plant breeding, seed saving, and seed exchange have here become dominated by state-supported breeding centres which focused on productivity and market demands. The seed economy has subsequently become governed by multinational seed companies that restrict seed saving or exchange, selling seeds as technological packages along with pesticides and other agro-chemicals (Kloppenburg 2005). Multi-national agribusinesses have often privatised seeds and plant genetics, restricting not only access to seeds but also the ability for farmers to replant them. Further, technological innovations such as genetically engineered seeds and pesticides tend to create treadmills of dependency in which farmers become increasingly reliant on agribusinesses for inputs and expertise (Stone & Flachs 2018). Alternatively, rural communities have reversed this trend by creating seed saver networks to develop, preserve, and share seeds that are suitable to local agro-ecoystems and diets. These networks often support garden landscapes over monocultures, reciprocal exchange over market exchange, and low-input agriculture over high-input agriculture (Nazarea 2005).

While the corporate control of seeds shows the imposition of corporate power, anthropologists also consider how such power is resisted by activists and farmers (Fitting 2010). Participatory, democratic seed exchanges may have the potential to slow and even reverse the active dispossession of farmers and create new forms of ‘seed sovereignty’ (Kloppenburg 2010). At the same time, participatory plant breeding programs may harbour the potential to not only create access to seeds, but to also breed seeds specifically suited for farmers’ agro-ecologies (Almekinders, Thiele & Danial 2007). Seed saving among Tharaka farmers in Kenya, for example, contributes to crop diversity, but depends on strong social organisation for seed exchange (Laberyrie et al. 2014).

Agrochemicals such as soil fertilisers or products that kill plant weeds (herbicides), insect pests (insecticides), and fungal diseases (fungicides), have become a seemingly unavoidable part of the farming landscape. Yet the impacts of their production and use are longstanding and far-reaching, as shown by the pesticide plant disaster in Bhopal, India in 1984. The plant’s explosion, which resulted from lax safety design, poisoned the air of Bhopal and killed thousands, while leaving long-term health risks for the survivors (Fortun 2001).

Alternative markets (e.g. fair trade, organic, and bird-friendly farming) break the binary distinction between corporate vs. non-corporate agriculture. Here, commercial production practices may replace pesticides and synthetic fertilisers with integrated pest management and soil conservation practices. Anthropologists have filled a critical role in understanding these markets by asking who benefits from them, what effect they have on environmental health and economic sustainability, and whether these markets tame or deepen market forces. Farmers markets in the United States have expanded as farmers seek out reliable local markets and consumers hope to support local farming and know where their food comes from. However, like conventional markets, direct trade often involves a host of middlemen, such as processers and inspectors, and coalitions of busy farmers and distracted consumers face a difficult task in challenging conventional food systems (Janssen 2017). Some anthropologists warn that if alternative markets do not create new political possibilities, then they may only be another way of commodifying social and environmental life (Guthman 2007). The ethnographic study of fair trade thus challenges the potential of labelling initiatives for empowering farmers. Labelling tends to come with strict standards for farmers and little oversight for food companies who sell fair trade goods (Lyon & Moberg 2010). Origin labels for such goods as tequila and mezcal (Bowen 2015) or Darjeeling tea (Besky 2013) distinguish products from generic commodities, but fail to address many of the underlying historical and sociopolitical structures that affect farmers and farmworkers. Lastly, organic farming can today be part of industrialised farming, with only some minor differences from conventional agriculture (Guthman 2004). Ethnographic studies thus demonstrate the challenges of disrupting commodified flows of capital. Thinking holistically about how alternative markets work in the context of government policies, historical trajectories, and on-the-ground farming practices lends nuance and depth to how we understand them.

In recent years, land has come into focus for academics, as the threat of a global ‘land grab’ grows (Borras et al. 2012; White et al. 2012). The term ‘land grab’ refers to the large-scale purchase of land, often by foreign corporations, in countries of the Global South. This is a concern for land accessibility as well as national sovereignty. The land grab often dispossesses farming communities of land, sometimes through violent means, and it frequently leads to deforestation, as tracts of forest are converted to agricultural land. Anthropologists may themselves be financially entangled in these processes. For example, TIAA, a pension fund that manages retirement accounts for most U.S.-affiliated anthropologists, has become a major landowner in Brazil, whilst being denounced for environmental destruction and human rights violations (Farthing 2017).^[2]Even here, resistance is possible. Groups such as the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement foment both civil society political action and direct land transfers to support local farming and resist land dispossession (Wolford 2010).

Finally, farming knowledge has come into focus as a form of power as well. Agricultural extension agents have long used money and political influence as tools of imposing industrialised and modern farming practices (Arce & Long 1992). They continue to frame scientific Western agricultural knowledge as expertise and Indigenous knowledge as a form of ignorance (Mitchell 2002). State agencies for agricultural research and extension, and private corporations’ research and development departments, invest in knowledge production and dissemination and tend to focus on cash crops and exportable goods. Anthropologists often work to de-centre this knowledge by studying alternative ways of doing and knowing agriculture. They frequently advocate for the incorporation of and respect for Indigenous knowledge in rural development (Sillitoe 2006) and on many occasions they work to recognise non-industrial farming practices and knowledge as legitimate (e.g. González 2001).

Culture: meaning and identity

Farming is always imbued with cultural and social connections, a fact that is increasingly recognised in the study of food production. Agronomists can explain how much nitrogen is necessary to grow a high yield of corn, but anthropologists show that, for example, farmers may use ideas of hot and cold to inform their use of manure (González 2001). Economists can show that cultivating crops without using any kind of tillage saves farmers time and money, but anthropologists may find that, for farmers, tillage practices demonstrate their hard work, skill, and masculinity. In agriculture, as in other industries, meaning and collective identities are connected to work and practice (Holland et al. 2001). Gender, race, and class also structure how farmers perform agriculture and how they access land, credit, and agricultural knowledge. Anthropologists thus often foreground the importance of meaning-making, identity, and the value of agriculture to people.

For example, notions of what constitutes ‘good farming’ connect farm work to a farmer’s reputation and standing in a community. Being considered a good farmer can be used to control in-group colleagues and also assert authority and legitimacy against other groups. Industrial farmers attribute social value to industrial practices and landscapes – claiming a certain rationality and cultural value as well as a concrete benefit of ‘feeding the world’ (Burton 2004). White farmers in Zimbabwe may claim to be good farmers to legitimise their calls for land access. They argue that their stewardship of the land and farming skills (expressed in technical know-how and yield maximization) give them more legitimate claims to the land and to the identity of being farmers than Indigenous or Black farmers may have (Suzuki 2018). Holdeman Mennonites in Brazil also connect moral frames of being good farmers, good family members, and good community members by limiting land holdings within their communities to better distribute land and by limiting the use of GPS-guided precision farming technology and large machinery (Ofstehage 2019).

Racism, sexism, and nationalism also affect farming life. They may exclude people from farming by limiting land access, access to credit, and land extension. For example, Black farmers in the United States still fight for land and basic inclusion (Grim 1995) while Black farmers’ cooperatives and unions have in the past struggled for the rights of southern tenant farmers and supported alternative agricultural visions and practices (White 2017). Black farmers thereby not only fight for the right to farm: they also work for recognition of their farming expertise and experience, paralleling and contributing to the struggle for civil rights (McCutcheon 2019). American Indian farmers equally fight for the right to farm on their own terms while often facing condescension and pressure to adopt white farmer attitudes and practices (Biolsi 2018). In Latin America, farmer-to-farmer exchanges support and enrich alternative ways of farming, resisting dominant trends of modernising agriculture and supporting collective identities of campesino (peasant) agriculture (Holt-Giménez 2006).

Gender, masculinity, and femininity equally structure farming and are structured by it. Farming masculinities may be moulded to fit concepts of modern agriculture. For example, in the United States farm labour has become increasingly centred on men as family farms have transformed from dispersed family labour and decision-making to production dominated by single individuals (Barlett 1993). Peggy Barlett argues that as agriculture has become more of a business-centred activity focused on profit, men in heterosexual farm families have excluded women from both farm work and decision-making. More recently, the image of farming masculinity has shifted away from productivist markers like straight crop rows, weed-free fields, and high yields, to financial markers such as profitability, total acreage, and media presence (Bell et al. 2015; Ofstehage 2018a). Farmers who do not conform to this vision of agriculture can be subject to ridicule or dismissed as hobby farmers. Women farmers are particularly under pressure to demonstrate their business savvy, leading them to understate concerns for the environment, community, and family (Ofstehage 2018a). An alternative to agrarian and industrial masculinities, driven by the sustainable agriculture movement, values cooperation, avoids discourses of ‘toughness’, and readily experiments with new farming technology and practices (Barlett & Conger 2004).

Conceptions of gender linked to agriculture change over time. For example, historically in Andean agriculture, men were often tasked with field-based agriculture and women with pastoral work. As Andean agriculture became more intensive and commercial, soil degradation increased and crop fields cultivated by men encroached upon pastures and common spaces tended by women (Paulson 2003). The changes in Andean agriculture show how economic, ecological, and gender changes are connected and shape each other. Women farmers in the United States face significant institutional, interactional, and symbolic barriers to becoming independent (Keller 2014). US women dairy farmers, for example, have faced barriers when applying for farm credit, in everyday interactions with other (often male) farmers, and even in claiming an identity as a farmer and not as someone’s wife, as a gardener, nor as a hobby farmer. They work to deconstruct the heteronormative figures of the farmer as man and farm-wife as woman in a family unit of gendered labour. They also build new femininities around alternative agricultures of stewardship, community, and work (Shisler & Sbicca 2019). Since concepts such as ‘farmer’, ‘good farmer’ or ‘farming masculinity’ are collectively defined, they remain open to the creation and defense of alternative understandings of gender.

More recent studies suggest that, beyond agricultural practices and attitudes, different ontologies of agriculture may exist. Oil palm cultivation in West Papua is commonly framed in Western worldviews as a conflict between local Indigenous groups and agribusiness. However, to local Marind people the palm itself is a malevolent, anti-social person that haunts dreams (Chao 2018). To take a second example, settler colonialism can be rightly viewed as a conflict over land, belonging, and property. Yet this interpretation may betray fundamental differences in how white settlers and Indigenous communities relate to land (Burow, Brock & Dove 2018). Indigenous communities simultaneously fight for the right to access land and against anyone owning land as property. Thus, conflicts and differences in land use, land ownership, conservation, and degradation can extend beyond struggles over resources or values. Ontological struggles over land ownership and resource use question whether land can be owned at all, or if life can be defined through resources. They speak to broader conflicts between different ways of being in the world, speculative futures, and on-going experiences.

Environment: animals, climate, and soil

The anthropological study of farming has roots in human ecology: that is, in the study of the relationships between people’s political and economic lives and their natural environment. In earlier years, this meant the study of relatively closed agricultural systems and a focus on how culture impacted ecologies. A classic environmental ethnography about the Tsembaga Maring of New Guinea, for example, described a complex socio-ecological system of swidden (or slash and burn) agriculture which balanced fallow periods, pig population, acreage, and food calorie production. This complex system was managed by an intricate ritual cycle that connected spirits to the physical realities of the environment (Rappaport 1967).

Recent trends in anthropology emphasise plant and animal relationships, relationships with a changing climate, the idea that there is a two-way connection between ecologies and humans, and the possibility that their interplay may be generative of altogether new realities. In general, this can be seen as a shift from understanding linear relationships of action and ‘feedback’ to describing more complex relationships. It may also be a shift from the impact of humans on humans in food and agriculture to the impact of humans on non-human actors, worthy of study in their own right.

Taking such a more-than-human approach to ecologies that foregrounds non-human agency decentres people in order to better understand how humans and non-humans affect each other and change together. The Carolina Piedmont pig, for example, is a breed of pig that fetches a high market value, and is considered much more than a mere economic or natural resource. They are descended from hogs native to the Canary Islands and brought to North America by Spanish explorers, later to be abandoned on Ossabaw Island off the coast of the state of Georgia, where they became feral. Later, these pigs were driven from this island for threatening loggerhead turtles, and some ended up in farms in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Today they are prized for their flavour, ‘authenticity’, and ability to thrive on marginal land (Weiss 2016). These pigs are the product of the Spanish conquest, their own biological adaptations to living in a marginal environment, government policies enacted to protect an endangered species, and the work of small farmers in North Carolina. This raises a methodological issue: while participant observation and ethnographic interviews with human subjects are incredibly valuable tools, an adequate description of the ecological complexities of agriculture may require ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Ogden, Hall, & Tanita 2013). Seeking to understand how humans and non-humans act collectively may entail studying the lifecycle of farm animals that co-exist with human populations, or studying the interaction of fungi and plants that make crops grow well. This focus on change, emergence, and multispecies agency has inspired anthropologists to consider plants and animals as agents within production systems rather than as resources. They are changed by human action, but also change human action and thought.

Climate change is an unavoidable component of understanding how farmers engage in plant and animal production. Comparative and social studies of human adaptation and mitigation of climate change takes into account human adaptability to climate changes, but also humans’ attempts to reverse or slow them (Orlove 2005). Anthropologists document agricultural adaptations to climate change (such as seeking cooler fields at higher elevations, changing planting dates, or planting different crops) as well as cultural impacts of climate change. In Peru, for example, highland farmers are cultivating fields at higher elevations and selecting different seeds to adapt. Cultural institutions like the reciprocal work arrangements known as ayni, as well as seed sharing, support this transition (Sayre, Stenner & Argumedo 2019). Anthropologists may be positioned to facilitate adaptation to climate change, but their interventions are limited by local crop preferences, power dynamics, and ecological conditions other than climate change (Siregar & Crane 2011). In any case, they must understand the importance of sociocultural systems in climate change engagement, tensions between normative positions and adaptation, and how climate modeling interacts with everyday aspects of livelihoods (Crane 2010).

In moving toward an understanding of agriculture as a generative and relational process, anthropologists focus on more than just animals. Take the example of soil. Soil structures farmers’ lives and is structured by them (Kawa 2016). It is also subject to care or lack thereof, and soil care has material consequences, such as degradation or conservation (de la Bellacasa 2015). Soils are, in a very real way, generated by human activity, not just degraded or affected. For example, the soils of the Brazilian Cerrado are some of the oldest in the world, and humans played at least a partial role in creating them through repeated wildfires. Today, industrial farmers in the region fertilise these soils intensively. Large-scale farmers describe the land as wasteland and consider themselves experts who can convert a barren desert to a fertile breadbasket (Ofstehage 2018b). Yet the soil also induces farmers to change farming practices. In the Cerrado case, large-scale farmers adopt conservation tillage to reduce soil moisture loss in arid areas and learn to apply calcium carbonate to increase the soil pH. The farmers in this case use this encounter with the soil to create narratives of progress and expertise, claiming a role in improving the land and becoming expert farmers themselves. Land is generated out of biological and material ecosystems as well as forces of the state and capital in ways that shape how well-capitalised and technologically-advanced famers engage with it (Li 2014). Such relational aspects are reflected in studies that ask how alternatives to industrial agriculture can promote new interactions with soil, plants, and animals.

Looking forward

Two important trends in the literature on farming are studies of migrant farm workers and the situation of agriculture in times of epochal planetary change. Anthropologists have a rich history of studying farm labour on which recent scholarship builds. Seth Holmes followed migrant workers who fled Oaxaca due to violence and lack of jobs to labour camps on a Washington berry farm (Holmes 2013). His work connects the everyday lives of farmworkers to health, commodity markets, racism, and work. Similarly, in Brazil’s Northeast, landless farmers are recruited by intermediaries with kin and community relations to work on sugar cane plantations under dangerous conditions for little pay (de Menezes, da Silva & Cover 2012). Migrant sheepherders in Wyoming also work in a precarious and dangerous position as often undocumented workers. On top of that, they need to re-learn to shepherd under capitalist, business-oriented conditions and in a new natural environment (Krögel 2010). In India, the privatization of former commons has pushed landless farmers to migrate within the country and become farmworkers; their internal migration places greater pressure on local landless farmers (Breman 1985). In each of these cases, landlessness and market conditions drive migrants out of rural farming communities and into wage labour. They may at times own land or support communal ties in their original rural communities. Migrant farmworkers in the United States, for example, may work to support coffee farms in Veracruz (Núñez‐Madrazo 2007).

Anthropologists working with agricultural labourers increasingly decentre the farm site as they follow the flow and lives of mobile workers. Rural Indian farm workers are not only living in the countryside, but in moving in and out of agrarian and industrial work, they often get fired and hired with little notice (Breman 1996). The movement of farmworkers from Mexico to the United States is more of a circuit than a migration. Migrants from small agricultural communities of Veracruz, Mexico choose to migrate North in response to worsening coffee incomes back home and a scarcity of workers to harvest the coffee in the US (Griffith et al. 2017). Their incomes from precarious work in the United States then subsidise coffee farms in their home of Veracruz and, having few long-term permanent contracts and facing unfriendly immigration policies, their work in the United States remains temporary.

Studies of farming and agriculture in anthropology are also placing farming within the context of epochal planetary change characterised differently as the ‘Plantationocene’, ‘Capitalocene’, and ‘Anthropocene’. Donna Haraway (2015) suggests that world agriculture is becoming abstracted from place as plants, workers, and land are abstracted from local contexts and brought together again in contemporary plantations. She and other feminist political ecologists call our era the ‘Plantationocene’, to describe this abstraction and mobility of people and plants as well as the racialised work on plantations and farms (Haraway et al. 2016). Similar work shows that plantation farms are characterised by relationships of fixity in which labourers create enduring relationships with each other and the land (Besky 2017) and flexibility in which farm owners commodify land, work, and plants (Ofstehage 2018b). Jason Moore characterises the current era as the ‘Capitalocene’, as he finds it’s driven not by human activity in general, but capitalist human activity. Building on the theory that capitalism may lead to environmental collapse (also known as ‘metabolic rift’), he suggests that the on-going destruction of land and other means of production is not critical for capital, but rather increases the commodification of life and expands capital further (Moore 2012). Socio-ecological crisis in the Capitalocene may expand commodity frontiers as farmers look for cheaper land and labour. The ‘Anthropocene’, or the global era defined by human activity, is also made manifest in farming. This happens differently across distinctive farming landscapes as farmers everywhere have specific encounters and interactions with landscapes. Everywhere, they leave the land and themselves changed (Mathews 2018). As this recent work demonstrates, studies of farming can be informative of far more than food production – we learn about markets, work, environment, value, race, and gender in the way farming is and is not done.

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Note on contributor

Dr. Andrew Ofstehage grew up on a small corn and soybean farm in South Dakota. He earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his work on land, labour, and value among transnational soy farmers in Brazil. He holds a Master of Science from Wageningen University for his ethnographic work with quinoa famers and middlewomen in Bolivia and a Bachelor of Science in Agronomy from South Dakota State University. He is now a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University.

Andrew Ofstehage, 240D Warren Hall, Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States. alo52@cornell.edu.alofstehage@gmail.com.

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