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Dr. Kristina Jonutytė: Ethnographic research of minoritised groups in increasingly remote settings: A roundtable discussion

One of the main strengths of ethnographic methodologies is immersed, long-term research, which enables in-depth learning and a holistic vision of a given issue. Restricted or volatile access to ethnographic field sites thus presents not just practical difficulties but it raises a host of important methodological, epistemological, ethical and other questions.

A roundtable discussion at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin brought together scholars working in the fields of anthropology and area studies sharing their experiences of conducting ethnographic research in places that appear increasingly inaccessible due to political conflicts, war and rigid authoritarian regimes. In such contexts, the study of minoritized populations (ethnic, religious) is often particularly unwelcome by the dominating regimes, as they may experience rigid security policies, second-class citizenship, and even persecution. At the same time, the predicament of minoritized groups may thus require greater outside visibility and scrutiny.

Roundtable participants discussed the contexts of contemporary Russia, China, and places in Central Asia such as Tajikistan, which had been relatively accessible for various forms of social scientific research but this has changed in recent years because of shifting domestic and international politics. These places, like many others around the world, can be thought of as “increasingly remote”, referring both to their relative inaccessibility to certain kinds of research as well as to the social and political processes that construct such remoteness (Harms et al 2014). Remoteness here is not an absolute category, but a relative and changing one, related to one’s positionality, perspective, power, and other factors, as well as related to processes of marginalization and minoritization. We are particularly interested in what this “return of remoteness” (Saxer and Andersson 2019) means for ethnographic research. How can scholars continue doing research in/on such settings? How are they being affected (professionally, personally) by the changing circumstances? What are the ethical challenges of such studies, especially with regard to the personal safety of research partners? And what political responsibilities does it entail for anthropologists and area studies scholars who do research in politically sensitive settings?

Image 1: Poster for roundtable discussion on 15 May 2024 (Transregional Central Asian Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin)

Methodologically, too, “increasingly remote” settings pose significant challenges. First-hand in-depth knowledge appears especially important in such contexts, while also being difficult to obtain. We thus asked: Which approaches or strategies do scholars opt for? Can remote ethnography, material culture studies, new area and mobility studies or other approaches provide substantial alternatives when in-person fieldwork is not possible? Roundtable participants reflected on how changing accessibility of their field sites has shaped their research questions and approaches.

Having started her ethnographic research in Buryatia – then part of the Soviet Union – in the late 1960s, Caroline Humphrey recalled selecting the seemingly least problematic topic of study – kinship – knowing many other issues like politics or religion were strictly off limits. However, she soon found that through kinship, she could indeed access many other important issues that could otherwise hardly be discussed, like tragic family histories due to communist policies. Over time, accessibility shifted in her field: from the initial Moscow-supervised official field visit to more informal visits in the 1970s, 1990s and early 2000s, where she found research participants to be more open about a wide range of topics, through to an officially permitted visit in the borderland region in the 2010s. Throughout these changeable circumstances, Caroline highlighted lasting friendships as key to successful fieldwork under uncertain conditions. More recently, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Buryatia has grown once again grown “remote” for fieldwork but, as Caroline suggested, it might be more accurate to say that it has been distanced from the perspective of the researcher, who chooses not to go there to ensure the safety of interlocutors. She highlighted a range of ethical challenges that have emerged doing research in the region, like choosing not to publish some of the data to protect interlocutors, highlighting a thread of fear and concealment among locals, especially minoritized groups, due to the history of repressions and their often precarious situation today. At the same time, she noted that the researcher’s position also changes over time, and with it access to various field sites, groups and resources shifts, too. Finally, Caroline noted she finds it important to keep in touch with colleagues in “increasingly remote” Russia and exchange with them professionally rather than engage in academic boycott.

Rune Steenberg’s field site in Xinjiang was rather difficult to access from the beginning of his field research in 2009, but still manageable for low-profile visits up to 2016. As China’s policies in the region grew more oppressive, in-person research for him was no longer viable. Since then, he has utilized a variety of approaches from doing Uyghur-related ethnography outside of Xinjiang, remote ethnography, textual and online research to working collaboratively with researchers, diaspora and others who could access the region in one way or another. Arguing that ethnographic research is always already limited as access is restricted by our positionality, cultural norms, and a range of other factors, Rune nonetheless believes that whenever possible, remote research should be supplementary rather than a substitute to in-person research. Currently, he leads a group project “Remote ethnography of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”, combining a variety of remote methods to study this region inaccessible to most researchers, marked by extreme state violence and human rights violations. Through this multifaceted experience, Rune has found that remote ethnography is best as a group endeavor, multiple perspectives and approaches adding value to the whole.

Manja Stephan’s selected research topic of Muslim mobilities led her far outside of her initially selected place of study in Tajikistan. Due to the fear of Islamization, religious students she sought to do fieldwork with were increasingly marginalized and criminalized in the country, as securitization of Islam grew. As a consequence, she found translocality and mobility studies to be more suitable research approaches, rather than place-based ethnographic study. Mobility biographies she collected as part of her research led her not only to Dubai where she did in-person fieldwork with Tajik migrants, but also to places like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia. Remoteness being a matter of power and a politically constructed condition, Manja’s fieldwork was framed by national policies, as her research participants themselves grew “remote” from mainstream Tajik life. This is one example of a situation of “authoritarianism paradox”: the more difficult it is to research a given minoritized group in an authoritarian setting, the more interest there may be in doing so, and the more necessary it is to undertake such research to draw attention to the position and voices of locals. At the same time, as in-person research in such contexts is severely limited, macro-level studies from afar, which have a tendency towards simplification, gain prominence over ethnographic research.

Conducting research in Bashkortostan, Russia, Jesko Schmoller has found his field site physically inaccessible since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since his research primarily focuses on place, exploring Muslim place-making in Bashkortostan, restricted access appeared as an especially significant obstacle. While Jesko hopes to return to in-person fieldwork when it is once again possible, for now, he found textual studies to be unexpectedly eye-opening, providing insight into important aspects of Bashkir culture and religion previously unknown to him. He found that ethnographers should ideally be working with primary texts more even if they have good field access. Initially skeptical of relying on text too heavily, he now works with original Bashkir texts, such as Ufa-published “Bashkortostan: the land of Awliya [Friends of God]”, with a focus on religion and space. In his current research, he asks: What insight can be gained into sacred space through primary texts? Can they provide insight into a growing spatial marginalization of Muslims in Russia? Can one be in proximity to sacred places via text and gain insights into local ontologies (rather than discourses) without being there in person? From a local Sufi Muslim perspective, for instance, the Bashkir sacred landscape exists on yet another plane than the physical one. May such texts be regarded a medium to gain a sense impression of this kind of concealed geography?

Like Jesko, other speakers try to approach the newfound remoteness as an opportunity rather than a limitation. Rune and Manja both recounted that when they did research with participants outside of their repressive home country, they were much more open and research was more productive. Another opportunity provided by remoteness was various local publications as noted by Jesko Schmoller and Caroline Humphrey, who noticed an increase in local publications across Russia – as perhaps also in other regions – which provide a treasure trove to anthropologists who can rely on them as data, given their preexisting in-depth knowledge of the context. Another remote method that Caroline has made use of together with David Sneath (1999) in “The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia” was remote sensing, namely using satellite photography to make visible the effects of contrasting land-use systems along the Russian-Mongolian border. While this method provided important insights into local environmental changes, Caroline stressed the difficulties involved in interpreting remote sensory data and the necessity to triangulate it with other kinds of knowledge. Rune Steenberg, too, regularly uses various kinds of remote sensing data in his research, extracting significant information even from tourists’ videos and travel accounts. He stressed that “epistemological care” is of utmost importance in remote research: transparency about the certainty of arguments made in remote ethnographic research provides an important corrective in precarious research contexts.

Moreover, Caroline argued that remote research widens the scope of ethnographic investigation, as it is no longer confined to the researcher’s physical presence. At the same time, it may become more similar to historians’ research techniques. Relatedly, Manja asked: if ethnographers lose access to in-person fieldwork and rely only on remote data, what is it that specifically ethnographic remote research contributes? To Rune, the answer lies in ethnography’s holistic approach and in the thick description that uncovers multiple layers of meaning and perspectives. This is enabled by deep immersion in a local context through ethnographic methods but if need be, one can even undertake artificial immersion away from the research area, through a period of intense engagement with local media, social media, communicating in the local language with people from there and other means. Also, “classical” ethnographic fieldwork outside of the inaccessible region is often part of remote ethnographic methodologies.

Caroline raised another important question: what can ethnographers doing remote research contribute that would differ from and add value to what the diaspora or other critical voices of the studied group are already saying? While this question requires a broader discussion, as preliminary remarks, Rune suggested that while cooperation with members of the diaspora is crucial, it is also important to note that they often have their own visions and agendas, so social scientific methodologies and analyses are a meaningful contribution. Manja added that working solely with members of the diaspora may provide little representation of the social, economic, cultural and other diversity of society in their homeland.

The role of institutions appeared as important to the speakers, all of whom strove towards strong connections on the ground rather than an official veil to their research. Yet this is not always possible, like in Caroline’s initial fieldwork, where Buryat collective farms could only be accessed with official approvals from both Moscow and the Buryat authorities. Manja spoke of a seemingly growing expectation institutions hold towards researchers to engage in “scientific diplomacy” along their research responsibilities, acting as representatives of their institutions and even nation-states in the field. These roles can be difficult to balance and even disadvantageous for some kinds of research, shaping ethnographer’s relationships in the field. Finally, Rune stressed the importance of critically engaging with the institutions we partake in, such as universities. Their growing neoliberalisation is a significant component of the broader, global political processes that reproduce the kinds of conditions for human rights abuses, surveillance, marginalisation and precarity in the places we study. Opposing structures that reproduce inequalities in our home societies is therefore important in beginning to oppose them in places of research.

Bibliography

Harms, Erik, Shafqat Hussain, and Sara Shneiderman. 2014. “Remote and edgy: new takes on old anthropological themes.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 361–381.

Humphrey, Caroline, and David Sneath. 1999. The end of Nomadism?: Society, state, and the environment in Inner Asia. Duke University Press.

Saxer, Martin, and Ruben Andersson. 2019. “The return of remoteness: insecurity, isolation and connectivity in the new world disorder.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27(2): 140-155.

Dr. Kristina Jonutytė is an associate professor at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University. Her research interests lie in political anthropology and the anthropology of religion, with an ethnographic focus on Buryatia, Russia and Mongolia. The present text was prepared during a visiting fellowship at the Central Asian Seminar, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin.

Cite as: Jonutytė, Kristina 2025. “Ethnographic research of minoritised groups in increasingly remote settings: A roundtable discussion” Focaalblog 20 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/02/20/dr-kristina-jonutyte-ethnographic-research-of-minoritised-groups-in-increasingly-remote-settings-a-roundtable-discussion/

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Christi van der Westhuizen: Necropolitics at South Africa’s Stilfontein Mine

Image 1: Derelict shaft used by so-called illegal miners in Stilfontein to access mining tunnels. Photo by Kimon de Greef

An uncaring government and a gang of unscrupulous criminals. Caught between them are people regarded as expendable – people who, pushed into a desperate situation because of poverty, turn to dangerous work that exposes them to a merciless police “service”. But then, in contrast to the aforementioned, there is also a community that tried to save lives, and non-governmental organizations trying to help on the basis of the Constitution.

The nightmare situation in which so-called illegal miners in Stilfontein in South Africa’s Northwest province found themselves, represents a perfect storm of contemporary power dynamics – not only in South Africa but across the world.

South Africa has tended in the past several years to feature in global news for all the wrong reasons. The situation at Stilfontein involved hundreds of men working illegally underground in an abandoned gold mine. The South African Police service (SAPS) blockaded the mine as part of a national operation called “Vala Umgodi”, the Zulu phrase for “close the hole”, which started in December 2023. It involves blocking the entrances to shafts to prevent provisions from reaching the miners to force them out from underground.

Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni’s aggressive statement that the miners would be “smoked out” of the mine, attracted worldwide attention even in these pitiless times. She seemingly wanted to underline that the miners would receive no help despite reports that they were starving because of the police’s purposeful blockading.

Finally, 87 bodies were brought to the surface at Stilfontein in January, and a total of 246 miners were rescued after spending several weeks underground with the dead. The rescue operation could only proceed after court actions by the community and civil society against the police. The police were at some point accused of disregarding a court order to allow food and other necessities into the mine. The Stilfontein standoff became a forced disaster with a death toll that eclipses the 2012 massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in the same province.

The actions and utterances of the police and the government were completely at odds with the central constitutional principle of human dignity in the South African Constitution, which government officials are compelled to uphold by virtue of their positions. Several years of rhetoric from government officials stigmatizing foreign Africans and promoting extreme violence against people who violate the law, irrespective of the type and circumstances of the crime committed, resulted in avoidable deaths at Stilfontein.

What makes this more outrageous, is the fact that several of the miners were underaged, that armed men kept watch over the miners, and that the situation underground may have been one of modern slavery.

The power dynamics in action at Stilfontein illustrate the massive economic shifts that have taken place over the past four decades due to the liberalization of capital flows and other policy changes associated with globalized neoliberal capitalism. The once mighty mining industry of South Africa is shrinking dramatically. Disinvestment has taken place due to a combination of factors including costs, the reduction in easily accessible mineral reserves, and government policies.

Along with liberalization and deregulation come the informalization of economic activities – a world-wide phenomenon. Alongside and intertwined with the informal economic sphere grows a shadow economy. The dividing line between legal and illegal activities becomes increasingly blurred. In the shadows, organized crime spreads its tentacles. Along with the smuggling of drugs and firearms, human trafficking gets worse. The poor, women and minors are targeted.

What makes human trafficking possible is the growing difficulty to merely survive, given current economic conditions. People grasp frantically at promises of work, only to find out in horrific ways that they have been duped. Human trafficking is aimed mostly at sexual exploitation, but at least one-fifth of victims worldwide are forced into modern slavery for labour purposes.

In addition to human trafficking, migration has skyrocketed worldwide. While the extent is frequently exaggerated in public discourse in South Africa, migration from the rest of Africa to South Africa has also increased. Starting back in the 19th century, South Africa’s mining industry was built on the backs of people from the rest of Southern Africa, especially from what is today’s Mozambique. The majority of the Stilfontein miners were Mozambicans.

Yet not all miners are foreigners. There are local people involved, as shown in media interviews with anxious family members. In the context of an economy dipping in and out of recession and an unemployment rate of over 40 percent (as per the extended definition that includes both active and inactive job seekers), options to earn a living have drastically dwindled.

No one chooses to work underground in an unsafe mine for months in life-threatening conditions. Apart from those who ended up there under false pretenses due to human trafficking, there are people who have no other way of feeding themselves. Illegal miners belong to a new underclass found worldwide: people for whom neoliberal capitalism has no use and who, due to impoverishment, are delivered into what Achille Mbembe (2019) calls “necropolitics.” This is a form of politics that makes millions of people redundant and condemns them to “death-worlds”, extreme conditions in which they become the “living-dead”.

Instead of addressing the socio-economic problems caused by neoliberal capitalism that are forcing people to seek refuge elsewhere, politicians around the world are blaming migrants. This is also how attention in South Africa is diverted away from the policy decisions that have caused current social and economic predicaments. Given that the ruling African National Congress could not muster a humane response in accordance with the Constitution’s requirement of respect for life, one would at least have expected a more sophisticated reading of the situation from a party that still engages in Marxist-Leninist analyses of social and economic conditions. But the government is adamant about its approach being correct – even as facts emerge that overturn the easy stereotypes that politicians rely on.

Crime syndicates are not separate from governments and law enforcement agencies. Politicians and the police are often implicated in organized crime. For example, Al-Jazeera investigative journalists found a direct link between Zanu-PF’s continued stranglehold on Zimbabwe and informal mining operations. The gold that workers extract in life-threatening conditions for a pittance is ultimately sold in Dubai and keeps Mnangagwa and company in opulent power and comfort.

The mine in Stilfontein where people lived underground for months, digging in the ground under armed guard, with restricted food and water, was literally transformed into a death-world by the South African police. Some corpses were well decomposed by the time they were finally removed.

This is a translated, revised and edited version of a media column that first appeared on Netwerk24.com

Christi van der Westhuizen is an associate professor at Nelson Mandela University, heading up the Research Programme at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD). Her views are her own and do not reflect those of the university.

References

Mbembe, A. 2019. Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

Cite as: Westhuizen, Christi van der 2025. “Necropolitics at South Africa’s Stilfontein Mine” Focaalblog 3 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/02/03/christi-van-der-westhuizen-necropolitics-at-south-africas-stilfontein-mine/

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Mona-Lisa Wareka, Fiona McCormack & Bronwyn Isaacs: Alternative Anthropologies: Kete Aronui from the Waikato

As three anthropologists working at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, Aotearoa (New Zealand), we experience anthropology in our daily work in the context of our local histories, communities and politics. While many anthropologists are familiar with the critiques of anthropology that play out in the USA or Europe, the narratives and practices of anthropology from places such as New Zealand are less well known. We argue that these local, diverse experiences of anthropology can enlarge our international understandings and imaginations of what anthropology can be, as well as the challenges it may face.

Anthropologists working in New Zealand today face the same plethora of academic pressures as those found in their counterparts in North America, Britain and Europe; pressures instigated by decades of neoliberal reform, managerialism, and the impact of new entrepreneurial and corporate models of universities that shape everyday identities and social relationships (Shore 2010). Similarly, the critique of anthropology as a discipline rooted in colonial imperatives and practices, resounds in a society whose imperial history and settler colonial present continues to imprint on educational institutions, pedagogy and research. In New Zealand, no neat historical trajectory marks a path from extractive research, wherein Indigenous knowledge and ways of life are pottled for export to the empire’s core, to one based on mutuality, co-creation and the indigenisation of anthropological knowledge.

A Long-Term Entanglement

Anthropology in Aotearoa (a Māori name for New Zealand), however, also has its own distinct history that shapes its practices. Importantly, Anthropology in Aotearoa has never been exclusively for a Pākehā (New Zealand European) or non-Māori audience. Undoubtedly, the origins of the discipline lie in the British School of Social Anthropology, and with it, accompanying theories and methodologies that have been determined as largely Eurocentric and at times, blatantly racist. Tsosie (2017) highlights that the cultural constructions of Indigenous peoples in colonial-era anthropology has an ongoing influence on legislation and federal policy that has often harmed, displaced or dehumanised First Nations groups (in the context of North America). Yet, it can also be argued that there is an increasing attempt to acknowledge the harms caused by colonial anthropological inquiry to colonised Indigenous peoples, and such a move is also apace in Aotearoa.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ethnographers such as Elsdon Best, Percy Smith, and Edward Treagear significantly contributed to the body of knowledge on Māori culture and life during the early years of colonisation. They also constructed narratives that would later be deemed harmful and disingenuous to Māori; for example, Treagear’s (1885) The Aryan Maori, which claimed that Māori and British Europeans were of shared Aryan ancestry and that colonisation was more of a ‘family reunion’ between kin. Treagar and Smith are also notably for aiding in the formation of The Polynesian Society, an organisation of mainly Pākehā amateur anthropologists, which had a number of Māori members and more Te Reo Māori speaking Pākehā members in its formative years than at any other point in its history (Clayworth, 2014).

Māori were often considered the ‘subject’ in early anthropological studies, yet the discipline also seemed to attract Māori scholars including Sir Peter (Te Rangihīroa) Buck, Mākareti Papakura, and Maharaia Winiata; while Āpirana Ngata (a prominent Māori leader and politician) was also an optimistic proponent of anthropology. To Ngata and Buck especially, anthropology was a significant discipline through which Māoritanga (Māori culture) could be preserved as well as a tool for political regeneration (Kahotea 2006). Kahotea, observing that no other colonised peoples engaged with anthropology as early as Māori, points to the strategic nature of this deployment; rather than challenging colonial power imbalances, anthropology was a tool for forging a place for Māori within a drastically changed social, economic and political environment.

The origin of anthropology was associated with Western imperial expansion into new worlds, and explanation of the peoples and cultures they encountered back to the west. Ngata and Te Rangihiroa saw anthropology as a tool for cultural recovery and for expressing and maintaining a deeply held sense of identity and cultural being… (Kahotea 2006:6)

Indeed, Ngata’s use of anthropological kinship theory to understand the colonising other, is an early exercise in decolonial anthropology. Some 100 years ago, Ngata made a critical connection between kinship and ways of owning, associating European kinship, a “rapid lopping off” of receding relatives, with a system of inheritance and succession to property rooted primarily in exclusivity. Conversely, he visualised Māori kinship as made up of vertical, horizontal, and oblique relationships, radiating from a common ancestor or a group of common ancestors, a circle of relatives. Ngata then links this kinship patterning to Māori communal systems, wherein the inheritance of rights, privileges and property is traced though both maternal and paternal links, noting that this evokes a tendency to embrace rather than exclude, “those related by blood” (Ngata & Ngata 2019). These observations on property and kinship are relevant to contemporary Māori claims for recognition of colonial alienations of their land and sea territories.

Contributing to our Kete Aronui

Māori Studies emerged as a separate discipline in Universities during the 1970s (a decade later than teacher’s colleges implemented Māori studies), separating from Anthropology following the Māori cultural Renaissance in the 1970s-80s. Webster (1998), commenting on this disciplinary split, posits that anthropology was perceived to not fully support Māori initiatives and to displace Māori peoples as the ‘true’ experts of their own culture. In recent decades, however, anthropology in Aotearoa has made a renewed commitment to uplifting Māori voices, highlighting relevant local issues, involving Māori peoples at all levels of research, and placing an emphasis on Kaupapa Māori (Māori-centred research methodologies), Te Tiriti-centric (centred on the ‘Treaty of Waitangi’) or co-governance research methodologies. Indeed, the whakapapa (genealogy) of anthropology in Aotearoa for Māori means that for many, it continues to persist alongside Māori studies, rather than in competition with it. Māori perspectives in anthropology not only enrich the discipline, but enable Māori anthropologists to acquire helpful tools to walk consciously ‘between two worlds’, Te Ao Māori (the Māori worldview) and Te Ao Pākehā (the western worldview). An ability to walk consciously is a struggle faced daily by many Māori, particularly those in academic institutions. Māori Anthropologists do this, while reconfiguring learnings from the discipline to promote the interests of their respective kin groups – whānau, hapū and iwi – an active attempt, we suggest, to decolonise anthropology.

Waikato Anthropology

The University of Waikato is physically situated on land that was illegally confiscated by the British Crown from iwi Māori (tribes) (in particular, Ngāti Wairere and Ngāti Hauā) following extensive wars between Māori and European colonists in the mid 19th century. The Māori King movement, Te Kīngitanga, emerged within the Waikato region in 1858, its aim to provide a national forum for politically uniting Māori in their confrontations with the Crown. The position of Ariki (paramount chief) has been continuously held in the Waikato Region by descendants of the first king, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero and is currently held by University of Waikato graduate, Ngā Wai Hono i te Pō. This history has significant bearing on how the University operates. In the mid 1990s the University’s land was returned to Waikato Tainui (the local iwi), who in turn agreed to lease the land back to the University. At this time, the University changed its motto and crest and increasingly adopted Māori symbols.

Over time, it has introduced a suite of special events (eg, Kīngitanga Day), infrastructure (such as the new Pā – a student, office and collective hub drawing on Māori architectural design and aesthetic features) and ceremonies that celebrate a partnership with Māori. All new staff undertake training in the history of Te Tiriti (also known by its English interpretation, The Treaty of Waitangi) and the University’s obligations to honour Te Tiriti in terms of recognising Māori sovereignty. This bureaucratic recognition of Māori and particularly, Waikato Tainui, does not rid the University of institutional racism or alter the arguably neoliberal decision making and partisan politics of senior leadership. Waikato Māori history does however provide a widely known political narrative against which everyday teaching, research and administrative practices take place.

Waikato anthropology was shaped more directly by Ngapare Hopa who became head of the department in 1994. Hopa, a Māori doctoral graduate of Oxford University, played an important role in advocating for anthropology to be active in everyday political activism and made New Zealand politics, especially Indigenous politics, a tangible issue for the discipline. While the economic insecurity and political disenfranchisement of Māori were Hopa’s key areas of focus, she was also influenced by previous generations of social science activism, such as Sol Tax’s work on self-determination and action research among the Meswaki Native Americans (Hopa 1988).

When Hopa returned to New Zealand in 1986, she did so with a political perspective on anthropological work which would offer a distinct challenge to most leading New Zealand anthropology of that time; in the mid 1980s New Zealand anthropology was working predominantly within culturalist and functionalist paradigms. Hopa wrote, “Whereas anthropologists have frequently returned from their vision quests to write about ‘their people’ and to somewhat romanticize the value and nobility of tribal life, some ‘native’ anthropologists like myself, raised in tribal contexts, have returned from a different vision quest, to ‘our people’ in response to their call and the clarion call of radical anthropologists for the need to decolonize the discipline” (1988:3). Hopa (2015) also fiercely criticised the “the competitive university environment” which prioritised publications and practical degrees before engaged action, quality education and the “wellbeing of our people”.

Competing legacies and histories of New Zealand anthropology, from the colonist’s desire to categorise savage and disappearing peoples, to early Māori scholars direct work within, and challenge to, the discipline from the early 20th century, was brought into a clearer theoretical debate in the 1990s. During this period, some anthropologists of European backgrounds ceased working with Māori communities altogether, accepting the request of some Māori academics that only Māori do research with Māori. Most famously, Linda Tuhiwai Smith who rose to become the Dean of the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies at Waikato, like Hopa, directly criticised the work of anthropologists (among others) who undertook an unethical and hierarchical approach to research with Māori. Tuhiwai Smith (1999) called for decolonised research methodologies that would be shaped by Māori and benefit Māori instead of primarily benefiting the career of the researcher.

Professor Smith’s exit from Waikato University in 2020 occurred in the context of broader accusations of ongoing institutional racism, specifically its treatment of Indigenous staff. The demands for a decolonised research process she initiated, however, ultimately affected both institutional ethics processes and research funding bodies across the country. The primary research funding bodies demand that all research that affect Māori demonstrate their benefit to Māori and justify how Māori tikanga (protocol, customs) and knowledge be upheld. Indeed, all research conducted by New Zealand based academics in Aotearoa requires acknowledgement of Vision Mātauranga, that is, unlocking the “innovation potential of Māori knowledge, resources and people”. For Anthropologists from outside of New Zealand who wish to undertake field research in Aotearoa, the national Anthropological Association ASAANZ (Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa New Zealand) urges compliance with its ethical principles and offers an ethics review service..

Political history has ongoing effects in terms of everyday anthropological practice. In the Waikato, anthropological “subjects” are part of the daily life in which anthropologists practice. Many students majoring in Anthropology or doing Masters or PhD degrees at the University of Waikato are Māori or are Indigenous cousins from the Pacific region. We find that many students are politically active and are not afraid to push for decolonial research and the acknowledgement of Māori sovereignty. Similar to the ongoing relationships between anthropologists and research communities in South America, as described by Restrepo and Escobar (2005), for those who do research with Māori communities, relationships with research “subjects” are ongoing. Interview informants include respected political leaders who themselves may also be respected leaders in the academic space. Anthropology seminars at Waikato University provide a space for diverse stakeholders including Māori activists and students, Pacific scholars, and academics of European ethnicity to meet in a space that is intentionally focused on community. Indeed, in anthropology seminars, community is a priority over academic innovation, even as the latter is significantly valued. We hope that these practices push back against “disciplinary genealogies and boundaries” and “normalizing machines that preclude the enablement of different anthropological practices and knowledge worldwide” (Restrepo & Escobar 2005:104).

From Indigenous Scholars to Indigenous Students: Mona-Lisa Wareka

As a Māori anthropologist (Ngātiwai, Ngāti Rereahu), the disciplinary training I, Mona, have received provides me with the tools to reconnect with my ethnic identity in a meaningful way, whilst also opportuning a space to share that sentiment with upcoming Māori and Pasifika students as a tutor and lecturer. As with Professor Ngapare Hopa, in learning about other cultures and the parallel struggles of former settler colonies, anthropology has critically enriched my understanding of my own culture and inspires me to look towards cross-cultural connections between Indigenous peoples. Throughout my university career, I have observed anthropologists at Waikato foster myself and other Māori and Pasifika (Pacific Island-descent) students, and bring awareness to issues relevant to the Pacific, including academic staff presenting evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal on behalf of hapū (tribal kin groups), participating in hīkoi (marches) and protests, and promoting Te Tiriti-centric research in Aotearoa; these are not acts of performative allyship, but a genuine practice of mutuality and cooperation. This academic environment, alongside the ability to culturally reconnect and become a pou (ritual post) for my whānau (extended family), has significantly influenced my academic career trajectory as a first-in-family tertiary student.

The appeal of anthropology to Māori and Pasifika students lies in several factors that I have identified in the past eight years as a student and as a member of the teaching staff at the University of Waikato. BIPOC students enjoy, and perform discernibly better, when there is authentic representation within the classroom, especially when the curriculum is additionally supportive of Indigenous worldviews, experiences, and knowledge systems within the learning process (Kowlessar and Thomas 2021). In the third-year of my undergraduate degree, I became a tutor for undergraduate anthropology classes, and during my current PhD journey, I have taken on the role of teaching fellow, lecturing a large first-year course employing anthropological approaches to interpret the cultural history of Aotearoa and its relation to the wider Pacific. Many students – particularly of Māori, Pasifika, Pākehā (non-Māori Europeans) descent – have expressed their enjoyment of the subject matter and content, and further acknowledge anthropology’s ability to foster and validate their own cultural experiences in the world. At the same time, this fostering can also be perceived as an active preservation of the discipline’s whakapapa (genealogy) in Aotearoa, inspiring students to assert their own sense of tino rangatiratanga (self-determination/sovereignty). Anthropologists in the University of Waikato Anthropology programme emphasise the importance of nurturing Indigenous students’ ability to critically explore their own cultural identities, history, knowledge systems and actively engage in politics of change. This kaupapa (principle) is felt by students, which is in turn reflected in their significant enrolment in anthropology degrees at the University of Waikato.

Anthropology in Aotearoa: local and global

In the context of New Zealand’s tertiary institutions, local metrics for measuring and evaluating academic performance, however, continue to entrench the hierarchy of disciplinary knowledge for Euro-American markets over and above anthropology at/for home. Indeed, the idea of New Zealand anthropology as peripheral to that produced in imperial centres, that its significance is confined to national or regional concerns, is also periodically voiced by our international colleagues. Keith Hart, for instance, in a 2016 workshop in SOAS contemplating the contemporary relevance of The Gift (sponsored by the journal HAU), commented in frustration, “The point … is not so we can learn about the fucking Māori.” This, we argue, is an unfortunate distinction. Perhaps the point is not to learn about, but rather with, “the Māori”.

Image 1: Rotorua activation in November 2024 as part of the recent hikoi protest march against the Treaty Principle Bill being introduced in the NZ parliament by the ACT party (photo Mona-Lisa Wareka)

What is specific about Anthropology from New Zealand is the prominence of Māori as founding ancestors and their critical role in shaping its maturation, both from inside and outside of the discipline’s boundaries. The relationships forged with Māori – as students, teachers, colleagues, researcher and researched – provide an up and close critique of anthropological theories and methods, a pragmatic response to attempts to reify Indigenous culture and ways of life and generate lines of solidarity. In turn, anthropology provides some Māori with another gateway for participation in their respective hapū and iwi by utilising their learned anthropological skills to actively participate and advocate for relevant social and political change (Kahotea 2006). The ability to intervene theoretically in contemporary debates, grounded in the tradition of comparative research and notions of the universality of human experiences, is very much alive in New Zealand Anthropology. This global reach is combined with a deep commitment to local concerns.

In Aotearoa, the effects of colonial violence on Indigenous people are everywhere to be observed – in the unbudging disparities in health, education, employment, housing, suicide rates, infant mortality, life expectancy, and more. The advance of climate demise is also exacerbating existing lines of inequality, threatening Māori material culture and relationships with non-human kin. Since the new coalition government was elected in October 2023, New Zealand has witnessed a full pronged attack on its public health, education, welfare and environmental protections; a free market onslaught more accelerated than the neoliberalisation of New Zealand in the late 1980s. That this is now combined with moves to dismantle hard won Indigenous rights and recognitions and indeed deny colonial history, is of serious concern. As a national organisation, ASAANZ is actively confronting this challenge.

Mona-Lisa Wareka is a PhD candidate at the University of Waikato. Her PhD research studies Māori cultural values of conservation, wellbeing and Indigenous autonomy.

Dr. Fiona McCormack is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Waikato. Her research is based in marine and economic anthropology, drawing on field research from Aotearoa, Hawaii, Ireland and Iceland.

Dr. Bronwyn Isaacs is a lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Waikato. She specialises in the anthropology of labour, visual media and nationalism.

References

Ngata, Apirana., & Ngata, Wayne. (2019). The terminology of whakapapa. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 128(1), 19-42.

Shore, Cris. (2010). Beyond the multiversity: Neoliberalism and the rise of the schizophrenic university. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 18(1), 15-29.

Kowlessar, K., & Thomas, C. (2021). “This space is not for me”: BIPOC identities in

academic spaces. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 58(3), 1-3.

Kahotea, Des Tatana. (2006). The ‘native informant’ anthropologists as kaupapa Māori research. MAI Review 1(1), 1-9.

Clayworth, Peter. (2014). ‘Anthropology and archaeology – ‘Salvage anthropology’ and the birth of professionalism’, Te Ara – the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand. http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/mi/anthropology-and-archaeology/page-3 (accessed 18 November 2024).

Tsosie, Rebecca. (2017). Indigenous peoples, anthropology, and the legacy of epistemic injustice. In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (pp. 356-369). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315212043.

Webster, Steven. (1998). Patrons of Maori Culture; Power, Theory, and Ideology in the Maori

Renaissance. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press.

Hopa, Ngapara Kaihina. 1988 Hopa, N. K. 1988. The Anthropologist as Tribal Advocate, American Anthropological Association, Phoenix, Arizona, November 1988, Centre for Maaori studies and research. University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Cite as: Wareka, Mona-Lisa, McCormack, Fiona and Isaacs, Bronwyn 2025. “Alternative Anthropologies: Kete Aronui from the Waikato” Focaalblog 23 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/01/23/mona-lisa-wareka-fiona-mccormack-bronwyn-isaacs-alternative-anthropologies-kete-aronui-from-the-waikato/

Art and Visual Anthropology, AVA General Posts, Blog

Görkem Akgöz: “The Sad Truth” Then and Now: Pasts and Presents of Danish Refugee Policy

This text was originally published in Swedish in Arbetar Historia (No.191-192, 2024). Special thanks to the editors for granting permission to republish.

In 2015, during the peak of what became known as the “refugee crisis,” global attention turned towards an unexpected actor: Denmark. Long regarded as a liberal refuge and one of the first signatories of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, Denmark experienced a significant policy shift under the ruling Social Democrats. i The country implemented some of the world’s strictest refugee policies, becoming the first nation to mandate that even resettled refugees must eventually return to their home countries.

Sjælsmark and Kærshovedgård, two semi-open “departure centres” established in 2013 to process rejected asylum-seekers, paradoxically became temporary residences for refugees who had already been granted permission to remain in Denmark. These deportation centres, which subject non-deported individuals to indefinite waits under conditions that verge on de facto incarceration, have become pivotal sites in Denmark’s deportation-focused asylum policy.

Danish migration scholar and documentary director Helle Stenum’s latest documentary, The Sad Truth (2023), takes viewers through the gates of these camps while situating them within Denmark’s broader historical context. The film focuses on young Syrian women confined to these camps, grappling with a harsh ultimatum: return to their war-torn homeland or remain indefinitely in a state of uncertainty. By interweaving their struggles with historical accounts of Danish deportation practices—such as the expulsion of Jews in the 1930s and the treatment of German war refugees between 1945-47—Stenum raises profound questions about historical memory: who gets to tell these stories, who is remembered, and who is forgotten? At its heart, the documentary interrogates the concept of agency, connecting past and present experiences.

Image 1: Screenshot from the Vimeo website for “The Sad Truth”; where the movie can be rented for viewing (see: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thesadtruth)

This interrogation of agency plays out in several layers throughout the film, both in the personal experiences of the refugees and the broader political discourse. At the highest political levels, Danish prime ministers invoke refugee issues in their New Year messages, reducing complex human experiences to numbers in debates about national challenges. Next, these numbers gain a face. We meet the young refugee women awaiting their fate in prison-like deportation camps, their circumstances shaped by constraints that limit their agency. Yet, through their stories of resilience and hope, we see the enduring power of personal narratives to illuminate the human cost of political decisions. White Danish activists represent another form of agency, using their privilege to amplify marginalized voices and challenge dominant narratives. Among the refugees, Rahima Abdullah’s journey reflects a dynamic and evolving agency. Initially impressed by Denmark’s commitment to the rule of law, her disillusionment grows as she witnesses its violations first-hand.

Finally, the film highlights the agency of two older female historians, Kirsten Lylloff and Lone Rünitz, who wrestle with the challenges of confronting uncomfortable historical truths.ii One of them poignantly reflects on the backlash that arises when challenging a nation’s self-image, saying, “A bird does not shit in its own nest.” This sentiment about the difficulty of critiquing one’s own country echoes a broader public discomfort with such discussions. A recent Washington Post opinion piece captures this shift in Danish politics, titled “How Progressive Denmark Became the Face of the Anti-Migration Left.”iii The article chronicles Denmark’s dramatic turn in refugee politics, noting, “Denmark was not always like this. Thirty years ago, the country was relatively open and welcoming, with strong protections for asylum seekers and refugees. But that started to change in the 1990s, as the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far-right Danish People’s Party proved politically potent.”

To this, our two historians might reply in present-day social media jargon: “Hold my beer! We need to go much further back than that to understand what’s happening now!” This is where the film’s second storyline comes in—the research of Lylloff and Rünitz on Denmark’s treatment of Jews in the 1930s and German war refugees between 1945-47, which provides crucial historical context to the contemporary refugee debate.

When the historians speak in the documentary, their presence closely aligns with what is often called the expository documentary format.iv This style typically features an authoritative voice-over or a historian presenting directly to the camera, acting as both narrator and objective assessor of evidence. However, Lylloff and Rünitz offer more than just authoritative voices. Their involvement goes beyond simply providing historical facts; they bring personal and professional insights into the conversation, adding depth and complexity to the film’s exploration of Denmark’s current refugee policies.

We first see these two women casually sitting on a bench, engaged in conversation with each other, sharing the personal and professional costs of their academic research. This intimate exchange adds a layer of depth to their authoritative roles, making them more relatable and humanized. In addition, another historian makes her presence felt in the film, though her face remains unseen—Helle Stenum herself. Through her academic writing and documentaries, including those that address the legacies of Danish colonialism, Stenum exposes her country’s troubling historical and contemporary record.v

In “The Sad Truth,” Stenum undertakes a challenging task—a diachronic historical comparison—that many historians are usually hesitant to pursue given the clear and significant structural and contextual differences between the late 1930s and the mid-2010s. Academically, the contemporary European (so-called) refugee crisis has not received sufficient historical contextualization. Historical analyses have been slow to integrate into refugee studies, a relatively new field dominated by social scientists with largely presentist concerns.vi However, outside academia, such comparisons have been made in public and political debates. 

A notable example comes from Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who, in the autumn of 2015, during the height of the so-called refugee crisis, warned of the dangers of “amnesia.” In an interview with The Guardian, Al Hussein argued that contemporary public rhetoric about refugees echoed that used by Western leaders in the late 1930s.vii It is this amnesia that the two Danish historians are trying to confront by telling the stories of Jewish and German war refugees. “Both politicians and ordinary Danes have incredibly short-term memories,” says one of them. As I watched, I found myself answering back, “Well, which nation doesn’t?” But it is not only public forgetting or historical amnesia at stake here. A Danish retiree affiliated with Grandparents for Asylum, a coalition of activists who support refugees, offers another perspective. She notes that many Danes she encounters remain unaware—or unwilling to acknowledge—what is happening. “When I tell them what we are doing, people don’t believe me,” she says. “They say, ‘But we Danes don’t treat people like that.’” viii So, what we’re dealing with is not just public forgetting of the past, but also a wilful ignorance of the present.

But where lies the distinction between the two? How do these two forces intertwine in the everyday lives of those affected by them? The documentary poignantly links two refugees from different time periods through a powerful scene: Syrian refugee Rahima touching the Stolpersteine, the stumbling stone marking the home of German Jew Ruth Niedrig, who was handed over to the Gestapo by Danish authorities. This gesture made me wonder: Did Stenum have the chance to show this scene to Rahima and other Syrian refugees? If so, how did they react? What was Rahima’s understanding of this history? Given her initial view of Denmark as a bastion of the rule of law, how did she respond to the historical context unfolding before her?

Though both Ruth and Rahima have grappled with profound uncertainties during their time in Denmark—navigating what can be described as the Danish limbo—their experiences are rooted in vastly different historical contexts, both politically and economically. In 1930s Denmark, amid post-Depression economic hardship and widespread unemployment, concerns about refugees draining social policy resources were widespread. By contrast, Rahima and her fellow Syrian refugees arrived during a period of economic prosperity, within the context of a strong welfare state. Yet, how did a country with a tradition of social solidarity gradually adopt an anti-refugee stance? How did this tradition evolve into a protectionist and xenophobic form of welfare-state patriotism? The film starkly illustrates this shift, particularly when the Danish Minister of Migration proudly references the Danish welfare state tradition in defence of the new refugee policy at the European Parliament.

The discourse of welfare-state patriotism transcends racial, religious, and cultural boundaries, feeding into broader debates about immigrant integration into Danish society. Central to these discussions are concerns about immigrants’ socioeconomic status, their employment in low-pay jobs, and their reliance on social benefits. Refugees are often depicted within this narrative as a burden—requiring substantial long-term investment from the state, while struggling to enter the labour market effectively. As such, the aim of the current Danish refugee and asylum policyseems twofold: to pressure those already in the country into accepting voluntary return, while simultaneously sending a loud and clear message: “Don’t think about coming to Denmark.” But, then, who is this message truly directed at?

The influx of largely extra-European refugees raised concerns about the potential long-term impact of mostly young Middle Eastern males on the social stability of European democracies. In 2012, sociologist Sara Farris coined the term “femonationalism” to describe the alignment between nationalist ideologies and certain feminist ideas, particularly when driven by xenophobic motivations.ix Farris documents how some European right-wing parties and self-identified feminists exploit women’s rights and gender equality principles to justify discriminatory practices against Muslim and non-Western immigrants.

I raise this concept here for two reasons. First, femonationalism is particularly relevant to Stenum’s documentary, which selectively portrays only female refugees, despite Denmark’s ostensibly non-gender-discriminatory refugee policy. This selective portrayal invites an exploration of its implications within the context of femonationalism and the institutionalization of gendered integration policies. Second, in 2019, the Danish prime minister declared a goal of “zero asylum seekers.” However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Denmark accepted Ukrainian refugees. Danish authorities and NGOs actively assisted these refugees, ensuring their integration into Danish society. What does this shift reveal about the political and societal consequences of categorizing, labelling, and stereotyping refugees?

As we continue to witness devastating acts of state-induced violence, most recently in Palestine, which flagrantly breach international law, the questions raised by Stenum’s documentary take on even greater urgency. Her work forces us to reckon not only with the memory of historical injustices but also with the present moment—where the way we treat refugees is inextricably tied to political ideologies, societal perceptions, and economic realities. This film serves as both a reminder and a challenge, asking us to confront the uncomfortable truths about how we view those who seek refuge, particularly when their needs clash with the dominant narratives of national identity and security. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” x Stenum’s documentary pushes us to recognize these images, to reckon with the past, and to engage with the present in ways that are both reflective and responsive to the demands of justice and humanity.

i During the Nazi occupation of Denmark, many Danish people played a crucial role in one of the largest and most exceptional rescue operations of the Holocaust, famously saving the lives of the vast majority of Jews living in Denmark, including several hundred German and “stateless Jews,” by helping them escape to Sweden. Levine, Paul A. 2011. “Sweden’s Complicated Neutrality and the Rescue of Danish Jewry.” In The Routledge History of the Holocaust, edited by Jonathan C. Friedman, 305-314. New York: Routledge.

ii See, for example, Lylloff, Kirsten. “Dødsårsager for tyske flygtningebørn i 1945 [Causes of death of German refugee children in 1945].” Ugeskr Laeger, vol. 162, no. 9, 2000; Rünitz, Lone. “Denmark’s Response to the Nazi Expulsion Policy, 1938-39.” Holocaust Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2005.

iii Rauhala, Emily. “How Progressive Denmark Became the Face of the Anti-Migration Left.” Washington Post, April 6, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/06/denmark-zero-asylum-refugees/. Accessed June 20, 2024. It is important to note that in this context, “the left” specifically refers to the Social Democratic Party. However, two parties to the left of the Social Democrats, which currently hold 24 out of 179 seats in parliament, are highly critical of the Social Democrats’ position on this issue. These parties advocate for a more “humanistic” approach to refugee policy and are poised to gain significant support, according to recent polls. Special thanks to Lars Kjølhede Christensen for bringing this point to my attention.

iv Bell, Desmond. “Documentary Film and the Poetics of History.” Journal of Media Practice, vol. 12, no. 1, 2011, p. 9.

v Stenum’s award-winning documentary “We Carry It Within Us” (2017) examines Denmark’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and explores how the colonial past continues to shape contemporary media, art, museums, education, and wealth distribution, alongside various practices of remembering and forgetting.

vi Ahonen, Pertti. “Europe and Refugees: 1938 and 2015-16.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 52, no. 2-3, 2018, p. 137.

vii Jones, Sam. “Refugee Rhetoric Echoes 1938 Summit Before Holocaust, UN Official Warns.” The Guardian, October 14, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/oct/14/refugee-rhetoric-echoes-1938-summit-before-holocaust-un-official-warns. Accessed June 20, 2024.

viii Rauhala, “How Progressive Denmark.”

ix Farris, Sara. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017.

x Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2003, p. 391.

Görkem Akgöz is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Her main research interests are global labour history, political economy, and women and gender history. She is the author of In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey(Brill, 2024). She is the co-chair of the Labour Network of the European Social Science History Conference, the co-coordinator of the Workplaces: Pasts and Presents working group of the European Labour History Network, and a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History. More information can be found at www.gorkemakgoz.com.

Cite as: Akgöz, Görkem 2025. “’The Sad Truth’ Then and Now: Pasts and Presents of Danish Refugee Policy” Focaalblog 8 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/01/08/gorkem-akgoz-the-sad-truth-then-and-now-pasts-and-presents-of-danish-refugee-policy/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Quirin Rieder: Drinking tea with the IMF: sticking to prices and protesting inflation in Aliabad, Northern Pakistan

Image 1: A Taxi driver during a tea break in Aliabad, 2023, photo by the author

Aziz put down the newspaper and sighed. “This is bad, the situation is bad”. Sitting in his small tea shop, he had just finished his routine practice of reading out loud some articles from the local Urdu newspaper K2, that publishes on issues in Gilgit-Baltistan (one of the Pakistani parts of Kashmir). Normally this is much appreciated not only by some of the town’s senior residents with bad eyesight, but also by the German anthropologist who sometimes struggled to decipher the miniature Urdu letters. Aziz had just read about the new hike in petrol and gas prices that was announced by the national government and would only increase the inflation in Pakistan, which had been soaring at that point, with an annual food inflation rate of over 50 per cent. Daado (an older regular customer; all names changed) and I were sitting around the small table in Aziz’s shop, while his 25-year-old son Farhan stood behind the counter and silently listened to our conversation while he prepared more chai or checked his phone. Aziz and Farhan’s chai shop stood next to the KKH, the Karakoram Highway, that links Pakistan’s capital Islamabad to China’s Xinyang province, passing through Aliabad in Hunza, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork between November 2022 and August 2023. During that time, I visited their shop nearly daily and became good friends with Aziz, Farhan and regular customers, keeping up with local news and gossip.

On that day at the end of February 2023, Aziz was not happy and folded away the newspaper. The headline stated that the IMF had imposed tight conditions on completing its current review phase that would release an urgently needed tranche of $1.1 billion to Pakistan. The country had been undergoing a constitutional crisis since former Prime Minister Imran Khan had lost a vote of confidence in March 2022, and massive floods submerged large parts of territory in the following summer, with the global energy and food crisis already hitting hard. Drained of foreign exchange reserves that were needed to import foodstuffs and energy resources, the national government had to radically devalue its currency and increase electricity and fuel prices (key IMF conditions), triggering an unprecedented inflation. The currency exchange rate went up from a relatively stable rate of US $1 = 170Rs (Pakistani Rupees) in the years 2019–2021, to 230Rs in 2022 and even reached 280Rs in January and February 2023. Daado shook his head and wearily sipped his tea. Aziz threw a last glimpse at the international news section reporting on the war in Ukraine, when he also shook his head and repeated: “These are hard times, it’s a very bad situation (haalat kharab hai)”. He then told me that he and his family had planned to visit Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, to meet friends and relatives, and get some routine medical check-ups in the renowned health facilities there, but the one-way bus ticket alone was 14.000Rs (for a ride of 20-26 hours). Overall, it would have cost them around 4 lakh (400.000Rs) for the whole trip, so they cancelled.

This text looks at practices of negotiating and un-doing inflation in everyday life. While rising prices routinely bring economic hardship for ordinary people, they also open up possibilities to contest the capitalist dynamics that trigger inflation in the first place. I explore this question through two examples: negotiations over the price of tea, and protests against cutting essential wheat flour subsidies. In Aliabad, inflation was far from being a supernatural economic force, and was instead understood as something that was done to the town’s residents by international, national and regional actors. As such, it could also be undone, at least to some extent.

The value of a cup of tea

Later that day, regular customers were scarce, and Aziz had left to prepare his family’s small plot of land for the upcoming seasonal opening of the water channels that Hunza is famous for. Only Farhan and I remained in the tea shop. I asked him whether these days fewer customers were coming because of the inflation. He shook his head: “No, I don’t think so. Not really actually.” I asked him why he kept the price for a cup of tea at 50Rs, given that in other places nearby, prices had gone up to 60Rs and sometimes even 70Rs. “Yes, I know”, he said wearily, then adding defensively “but why should I make my customers worry (parishaan)? For me, it’s okay like that. 50Rs, bas.” A little taken aback, I asked again: “But you also have higher costs, don’t you?” Farhan’s voice grew louder for a second: “Sure, for everything! Milk, tea powder, cooking gas… but 50Rs for a cup of tea is okay. “During the rest of my fieldwork and many months after, Aziz and Farhan stuck to this price, even though both frequently complained of the ingredients’ rising prices. Their refusal to increase the price of tea was an active act of affirming socio-cultural values like sociality, community, and accessibility of chai to customers over merely economic considerations in times of crisis. Whereas many other tea shops in Aliabad were quick to adapt their prices to the inflation rate, Farhan and his father kept it at 50Rs. Notably, these other tea shops were drawing on a different group of (also regular) local customers, mainly neighboring bazaar shop owners, who themself had also increased the prices for their goods and services. Every time I asked Farhan and his father about their reasons for not doing the same, they told me that they don’t want their customers to worry. That way, they emphasized the importance of chai as an essential good that should be provided to their regular customers that were largely older and not very affluent customers (and often neighbors and friends too) who might otherwise not be able to afford it.

Amidst the rapid inflation and unable to postpone the family’s medical trips indefinitely, their rejection of the impulse to raise prices was all the more remarkable. In situations of economic instability, people make price hikes relatable by, for example, complaining or blaming politicians for it (Amri 2023), and frequently – depending on a place’s economic history and imagined future – fall into narratives of despair (Muir 2016). However, such interpretations might overlook how local engagements with inflation are never only passive representations of broader economic developments, but also make for opportunities to actively mediate and navigate the meanings and consequences of inflation. Looking at inflation and price hikes this way means acknowledging that actors can reframe capitalist dynamics, even if they do not make their choices under self-selected circumstances (Narotzky and Besnier 2014; Thompson 1971).

This becomes especially visible when approaching inflation as shifts in the way people value certain things and activities. They thereby engage in “boundary struggles” (Fraser 2022) over, conceptually speaking, the relationships between exchange value and use value – in this instance, of chai. Farhan’s insistence on not changing prices means putting the use value over the exchange value of chai. Use value incorporates here not only tea as something you drink when thirsty, but also its cultural values like facilitating social life, and being affordable to customers. The reasoning behind not wanting to bother their customers is in line with these values of chai in facilitating community and participation in social life. Further, the refusal to increase prices also ensured the continuous coming of customers, and therefore was not entirely contrary to economic considerations.

Given that Aziz and Farhan didn’t make a fortune by their insistence on the 50Rs, their prioritization of social ideals while struggling with rising production costs shows that the relationship between use values and exchange value is never clear-cut nor predetermined. And especially processes like inflation open up avenues for redefining their (albeit fuzzy) boundaries. Adhering to ideas of socio-cultural provision while also ensuring clientele to come, ultimately meant that refusing to play along with the dynamics of global inflation came down to a cup of tea.

Un-doing inflation?

The newspaper that Aziz was reading on that morning in February 2023 also described how the crucial monthly bags of subsidized wheat flour would soon cost 36Rs per kg and might even rise to 58Rs per kg, and not 20Rs anymore. This was not even the first hike. The sub headline read that the rise was condemned by the “Awami Action Committee” that organizes public protests on various issues in the region. For the last few months, the value of the Pakistani Rupee had been decreasing significantly, leading to higher prices for imported oil and gas, among other things. And, it seemed, the regional and national government had decided to translate that price rise into higher prices for flour. When Aziz finished reading, Daado, the older customer next to me, exclaimed: “Listen, this flour subsidy, this is not a gift (tohfa) by the government! It’s our right (qanon), it’s the law of the UN, United Nations!” He said this twice, and with much emphasis.

Image 2: Charter of Demands and English Translation by Pamir Times 2024

Over the course of 2023, nation-wide protests against rising costs of living broke out, which the Pakistani sociologist Umair Javed (2023) described as “a product of total frustration at the state for violating its basic obligations towards citizens”. But in Aliabad, many like Daado saw not just a moral obligation on the side of state authorities to care for its people (Thompson 1971), but also a legal one, given the constitutional limbo and the lack of full citizenship rights (such as voting in national elections) of the region due to its relation to the Kashmir conflict (Ali 2019). So, in Gilgit-Baltistan, the rising inequalities, as well as the fact that the government appeared to directly relay inflation and IMF’s austerity measurements into cutting the flour subsidies of the already marginalized region, provided the context for protests against this move. A series of decentralized, often women-led protests and road blocks emerged in summer 2023. And when local state officials made only excuses and empty promises, an enormous, region-wide protest march to the main town Gilgit was organized by the Awami Action Committee that Aziz had read about.

In January and February 2024, huge sit-ins in Gilgit demanded a full reinstatement of the flour subsidy, but also presented a more fundamental 15 Point Charter of Demands. These included constitutional recognition of Gilgit-Baltistan as a full province of Pakistan, protection of communal land rights, a withdrawal of new direct taxes, enhanced transport, medical and energy infrastructure, and improved educational opportunities, especially for women. After weeks of protests (and also briefly before the country’s national elections in February 2024, in which residents of Gilgit-Baltistan tellingly couldn’t even participate), the flour subsidy was reinstated at full rate. The inflation and its impact on the flour rates had mobilized large parts of the population in Gilgit-Baltistan and united them in a broader political struggle. Resisting and even reversing inflation, and through it also forms of political marginalization, suddenly appeared to be possible.

Conclusion

Ethnography allows studying inflation by paying attention to how it is done and undone by various actors with different degrees of power. One avenue for this is looking at how the relationship between exchange and use value is actively re-negotiated. Shop-owners like Farhan and Aziz, for example, did not reproduce inflation in a straight-forward way, and instead prioritized communal values over exchange value. However, given the structural dependency on the cash economy and imports, the question remains how many trips or medical check-ups they can postpone before their refusal to raise the tea price will falter. Equally, the political organizers and the protestors in Gilgit-Baltistan did not agree with inflation leading to subsidy cuts and further deteriorating their economic resources and symbolic recognition in a situation of political marginalization. Their protest actually enabled the lowering of prices, by means of the reinstatement of the flour subsidy.

In their own ways, these two examples represent different facets of how people politicize and seek to un-do inflation. Highly aware of IMF conditions and their peculiar political situation, Aliabad’s residents concerned themselves deeply with inflation and came up with various forms of engaging with it. For my interlocutors, drinking tea and sharing bread with the IMF, then, did not mean falling into despair or normalizing inflation as something given. Instead, they embarked on different ways of politicizing, refusing, and resisting the effects of inflation as an unavoidable part of our economic system.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Quirin Rieder is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University Vienna. His doctoral research analyzes how access to electricity shapes social organization in Northern Pakistan.

References

Ali, Nosheen. 2019. Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Amri, Myriam. 2023. ‘Inflation as Talk, Economy as Feel: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Inflation’. Anthropology of the Middle East 18 (2): 27–45.

Fraser, Nancy. 2022. Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do about It. London: Verso.

Javed, Umair. 2023. ‘Burning Bills’. Dawn, 4 September 2023. https://www.dawn.com/news/1773941/burning-bills.

Muir, Sarah. 2016. ‘On Historical Exhaustion: Argentine Critique in an Era of “Total Corruption”’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (1): 129–58.

Narotzky, Susana, and Niko Besnier. 2014. ‘Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy: An Introduction’. Current Anthropology 55 (S9): S4–16.

Thompson, E.P. 1971. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’. Past & Present, no. 50, 76–136.

Cite as: Rieder, Quirin 2024. “Drinking tea with the IMF: sticking to prices and protesting inflation in Aliabad, Northern Pakistan” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/quirin-rieder-drinking-tea-with-the-imf-sticking-to-prices-and-protesting-inflation-in-aliabad-northern-pakistan/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Daromir Rudnyckyj: When is inflation a problem?

Image 1: A hand lettered sign promoting the Comox Valley LETS, photo by author

Amidst the media frenzy in recent years regarding inflation, it is worth asking when, and for whom, is inflation actually a problem? As economists are quick to point out, in the conventional monetary system the upsides and downsides of inflation are not equally distributed across populations. To illustrate, those on fixed incomes or who hold little debt (typically retirees of advanced age, such as baby boomers), are adversely affected by inflation because their spending power is effectively reduced. In contrast, those who hold large amounts of debt and the prospect of present and future wage increases (typically younger people holding student loans or with large mortgages, such as millennials) can actually benefit to a certain extent. This is because inflation effectively reduces the value of previously borrowed money. This elementary economics lesson reminds us that the adverse effects of inflation do not map neatly onto a class politics. Whereas for a poor pensioner inflation is a huge problem, for a poor student with a lot of debt, inflation may offer some benefits. Indeed, there is a generational politics to inflation.

To further explore the politics of inflation, here I analyze the expansion of what I term “the credit field” in the conventional monetary system and in a local currency system called the Comox Valley Local Exchange Trading System (LETS). The Comox Valley LETS (the LETSystem) was a pioneering community currency that was founded on central Vancouver Island in British Columbia in the 1980s. The LETSystem was a grassroots effort to redress economic downturns by fostering local liquidity and facilitating mutual credit among community members. The Comox Valley LETS became the prototype for a range of similar LETS that spread around the world and took hold in places as diverse as Japan, Australia, the UK, and Ecuador.

The Comox Valley LETSystem consisted of a network and three devices: the green dollar, a registry, and listings. The network was the community of users who had registered accounts with the LETS. The green dollar was the unit of account for the LETSystem. It was completely virtual—there was no paper currency and users could create money (as credit) whenever they needed simply out of the promise to repay the network at some future time. The registry was the central ledger in which the debits, credits, and balances of network members were recorded. The listings were essentially the marketplace for the LETSystem: a catalogue, printed monthly, of the goods and services either wanted or on offer by the members of the network.

The logistics of a transaction were not complex. In a hypothetical transaction a painter, Peter, might agree to paint Sue’s fence for $40/hour and accept payment in 50% green dollars. If he completed the job in 5 hours, Sue would owe him $100 in Canadian and $100 in green dollars. The portion of the debt denominated in Canadian dollars could be cleared using either cash or bank credit. The remaining debt was cleared when Peter called into the central office and recorded the transaction on the answering machine. Sometime later, typically the following day, a clerk in the central office would then credit $100 green dollars to Peter’s account and a debt of $100 to Sue’s account. This meant that Peter had accumulated an increased balance of $100 that was available as credit with the entire community of users at some future time. Sue, in contrast, had now had a commitment to the network of $100: she had essentially agreed to recompensate the network with $100 in goods and/or services at some future juncture.

The Credit Field

One useful concept I have sought to develop to understand how a LETS works is what I term “the credit field.” The credit field is the space-time of exchange possibility. In other words, it is the possibility that enables members of a network to participate in commercial exchange. It is in the credit field that inflation emerges as an issue, because expanding the credit field creates more money.

Expanding the credit field provides sufficient liquidity to enable commerce. It is one of the primary reasons that precious metal standards are an ineffective means of administering the supply of money in an economy. In the conventional money system, expanding the credit field is undertaken exclusively by two institutions that have the power to create money: the state and commercial banks. The state does so through printing money to buy goods and services or through techniques such as quantitative easing. Banks create money through issuing loans. The fractional reserve system ensures that banks only have to hold on deposit a small fraction of the money as liquidities, typically under 10%, when making new loans.

In contrast, in a LETS, any member of the network can create money. A LETS is similar to rotating savings systems and credit associations, insofar as they entail members of a network facilitating credit for one another. However, in a LETS the members do it in money that they create, rather than in state money. When one person issues a promise to repay (debt) the network, it creates credit for someone else in the network. In so doing, someone who incurs a commitment to the network benefits themselves by obtaining some good or service, but also benefits other members of the network by enhancing the opportunity for them to engage in exchanges. LETS credits are useless as assets because the credits earn no interest. Furthermore, these credits cannot be used for speculation—one can’t buy equities, bonds, or derivatives with LETS money.

Expanding the credit field and the problem of inflation

One potential response to the ability for users to create credit in this way is that it would lead to inflation, but when and for whom is inflation a problem? Compare again the different logics that undergird the conventional and LETS monetary systems.

The conventional money system is premised, in part, on the commodity theory of money, according to which the value of money stems from its scarcity (Menger 1892). Scarcity creates an incentive to accumulate, since one never knows what the future will bring, one is predisposed, proverbially, to “save for a rainy day.” The state seeks to regulate the creation of new money due to the danger of inflation. Too much money chasing too few goods can potentially cause inflation. The issuance of conventional money is premised on a zero-sum game: one person acquiring it, means someone else has lost it.

But LETSystem money is premised on a token theory of money (Ingham 2004; Vasantkumar 2019). As in language, symbols are infinitely abundant. Thus, rather than operating from the standpoint of scarcity, the operating concern is sufficiency: the amount of money should be commensurate with the needs of the network. One does not have to “save for a rainy day” because, whether one’s balance is positive or negative, one will always have sufficient money to meets one’s needs. LETSystem money is not zero-sum, but rather “positive sum” because one need not worry about not having it, because there is always a sufficient supply.

Because it is not scarce, there is no incentive to ensure its value. Network members decide the value of the goods/service they offer to the community. If a member accumulates credits, it creates an incentive to spend them, since there is not much benefit to the accumulation of credits. The incentive to spend, increases the volume of trade. (What an economist would call an increase in the velocity of money).

Two Theories of Money

The conventional money system attempts to reconcile the two main theories of money: the commodity (orthodox) theory and the token (heterodox) theory. In the conventional money system only the central bank and commercial banks can issue money that circulates widely. The restriction on the right to issue stems, at least in part, due to the fear of excessive inflation. This fear is based on the orthodox theory of money: that money’s value comes from its scarcity. To hold its value, the thinking goes, money should be treated at least partially, like gold, a commodity. But of course, some inflation is not deemed a problem, as long as it is kept within a certain circumscribed target, generally in the range of 2% per year (Holmes 2023). Nevertheless, in the conventional system, commercial banks and the central bank are empowered to create new money and do so all the time. The practices of creating money by printing it or issuing fractional reserve debt take place under the presumptions of a token theory of money.

In contrast, the LETSystem eschews the commodity theory of money and embraces the token (heterodox) theory of money that contends that money’s value comes from its recognition as a symbol of value by other members of a community. It can be issued by any user of the network at any time. In the LETSystem, inflation is not a problem in the same way, because creating money creates a credit for someone else in the system, which entails an incentive to spend that money. If someone knows that money is going to come back to them, they are more willing to part with their money in the first place. This has the effect of accelerating the exchange of goods and services, rather than hoarding of (scarce) money. This reduces the imperative to save money, which in the conventional system does not benefit anyone but the banks, who profit off savings through lending at interest. Facilitating the ability of members of a network to spend readily and at will benefits the members of a network by enabling the members to satisfy their real needs and wants, such as food, shelter, and clothing, rather than simply storing idle value for that ”rainy day.”

According to proponents and practitioners of the LETSystem, in general people were willing to pay more in green dollars than they were in federal dollars. Liberated from the imperative to hoard scarce money and empowered with the capacity to expand the credit field of their own accord, members of the network could spend freely to garner the goods and services they wanted or needed. As one participant in the system described to me, a babysitter who charged $3/hr in federal money realized quickly that she could charge $6/hr in green. This led to increased prices in green dollars, but given that money was not scarce, but rather abundant, the downside of such increases wasn’t really a problem.

In conclusion, often when I describe the LETSystem to colleagues, the usual surprised reaction is “people could issue money themselves, didn’t that lead to inflation!” Such a reaction makes two presumptions that might be worth reflecting on. First, we might ask, “when and for whom, exactly, is inflation a problem?” And second and more tellingly, we might also ask, “why are we so quick to trust bankers with stewarding the credit field as opposed to our neighbours?” After all, the recurrent economic crises that date back to 2007 and illiberal counterrevolution that has emerged in response suggests that they have not done a very good job.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory and is Past President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (2021-2023).  His research addresses money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, and the state. He is the author of Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance and Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development), which was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society. He is also the co-editor, with Filippo Osella, of the volume Religion and the Morality of the Market.

References

Holmes, Douglas. 2023. “Quelling Inflation: The Role of the Public.” Anthropology Today 39 (2):6-11.

Ingham, Geoffrey. 2004. The Nature of Money. Polity Press.

Menger, Karl. 1892. “On the Origin of Money.” Economic Journal 2 (6):239–255.

Vasantkumar, Chris. 2019. “Towards a Commodity Theory of Token Money: On ‘Gold Standard Thinking’ in a Fiat Currency World.” Journal of Cultural Economy 12 (4):317-335.

Cite as: Rudnyckyj, Daromir 2024. “When is inflation a problem?” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/daromir-rudnyckyj-when-is-inflation-a-problem/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Mélissa Gauthier: Inflation as pressure: coping mechanisms from Eastern Cuba

Image 1: Snapshot of Yoani Sanchez’s Twitter post, December 16, 2020. Source: “Mecardo negro en Cuba ya da señales de inflación: un carton de huevos a 300 pesos cubanos” by Rolando Nápoles

When the daily Miami-Santiago de Cuba flight landed in Cuba in May 2024, a passenger at the back of the plane shouted in Spanish: !Ya llegaron los dolares! “The dollars have arrived!” Everyone on board started laughing and clapping. In making that announcement, the Cuban passenger referred to the fact that visitors to Cuba were the main suppliers of hard currency on the island. It is extremely cumbersome, if not impossible for Cubans to exchange Cuban pesos to US dollars in official banks or in exchange offices. As a result, US dollars are effectively accessible only through the illicit market, fueled by foreign currencies entering the island thanks to travellers. In shouting that “the dollars” had arrived on the tarmac, the passenger also pointed to how everyone is looking for dollars in the hope of better life conditions. This vignette further speaks to the recent inflation phenomenon in Cuba, since the increased demand for foreign currency in the illicit market, caused by recent internal economic reforms, has created more inflation, subsequently deteriorating the value of the national currency (Truebas Acosta 2023).

We experienced this anecdote and many others similar to it while conducting fieldwork and teaching two ethnographic field schools during Summer 2023 and Spring 2024 in Santiago de Cuba. These stories, often full of sarcasm and humour, describe what the anthropologist Myriam Amri calls “inflation talk”, which she defines as “a mode of small talk that operates as critique and affect” (2023:29). “Inflation talk” further refers to anecdotes, jokes, conversations but also, as Amri shows, the sensorial experiences that relate to how inflation is lived every day. Stories also express how people cope with an “inflation bomb”, a term suggested by national economists to characterize the recent and ongoing inflation in Cuba.

The extreme escalation of prices in Cuba since 2021 is on everybody’s lips, generating anxiety and despair. In this blog, we engage with the following questions: how are Cubans responding to the current economic crisis? and, how do they respond to inflation rates while facing a complex economic system that is failing them? We use the increase of the price of eggs as a case study to explore how inflation is lived and dealt with every day. We investigate the phenomenon of inflation through the lense of pressure. Wiegratz, Dolan, Kimari, and Schmidt (2020) argue that pressure emerges at the convergence of “overarching ideology, economic structures, social webs of exchange, and the dynamics of capitalism,” and that pressure is the result of a disbalance between the reality of what people imagined being able to fulfill and the real economic burdens of their daily life. We argue that pressure allows for an in-depth understanding of the connections between how people live and how they strive to develop coping mechanisms to face pressure.

Inflation a lo Cubano

Based on their own data, the Cuban government reported an inflation of 77 per cent in 2021 and 39 per cent in 2022 (Estudios Economico de América Latina y el Caribe 2023). Other sources show more drastic figures. Cuban economists Pavel Vidal and Luis R. Luis (2024) report a “big-bang devaluation of the peso in 2021” with inflation rates ranging from 174 per cent to 700 per cent that same year. Such extreme figures reflect more accurately the increase of prices that were reported to us by Cubans. Inflation in Cuba is not characterized by a steady increase observed over a certain period. It corresponds to sudden inflation, and monetary instability, caused by a long stagnant economy, Donald Trump’s strict sanctions towards Cuba, the Covid-19 pandemic, and a failed economic reform (referred to as ordenamiento económico: money ordering). As a result, Cuba is undergoing its worst economic crisis in contemporary history; more than one million Cubans have left the island since 2021 in what is known as an unprecedented exodus.

In Cuba, the exchange rates between the Cuban pesos and the US dollar follow the rules of the informal sector. Rates are shared through internet communication technologies, mainly WhatsApp. Since 2022, the Cuban government exchanges Cuban pesos for US dollar at the fixed rate of 120 pesos to 1 US dollar. On the informal market, rates oscillate responding to supply and demand. As we write these lines, the exchange rate is approximately 310 pesos to 1 US dollar in Santiago de Cuba, and 320 pesos to 1 US dollar in Havana, according to local sources. In short, and as suggested by our opening vignette, nobody exchanges US dollars at the bank except tourists. To know the current informal exchange rate, Cubans join WhatsApp groups in which sellers and venders share their rate and how much money they wish to exchange.

In addition to accessing information about exchange rate tendencies on WhatsApp, Cubans also consult elTOQUE, an online platform which provides information about a broad range of topics, from music and literature to the oropouche epidemic ravaging Cuba. elTOQUE is associated with the Observatorio de Monedas y Finanzas de Cuba (OMFi: The Cuban Currency and Finance Observatory) led by Pavel Vidal, an economist who worked for the Cuban Central Bank but who now resides in Colombia, and Abraham Calás, the director of development of elTOQUE website. The site provides the daily exchange rate in the informal sector as well as analysis about the evolution of economic and financial indicators. As explained on the site, the OMFi monitors prices and other data related to remittances, using algorithms that they collect through online sales of currency. elTOQUE has become the reference for Cubans on the island and in the diaspora who wish to get the pulse of the daily exchange rate in Cuba (note that elTOQUE figures do not account for local variations). The site is not based in Cuba and is not approved by official Cuban authorities.

Eggs as indicator of inflation

In Cuba, the popular saying “Aqui todo cuesta un huevo” (Here everything costs an egg) is a way of criticizing the exorbitant prices of consumption products. Eggs are scarce, and when Cubans can find some, they are inaccessible because of their prices. In Fall 2024, the price of a carton of 30 eggs is oscillating between 3,000-4,000 Cuban pesos, close to the 5,000 pesos basic monthly salary of a family medical doctor. In recent years, complaining about the escalating price of eggs has become a reference point to discuss inflation and the harshness of life. For instance, the famous blogger Yoani Sánchez complained on Twitter that the price of a box of a carton of 30 eggs was 300 Cuban pesos. That was in 2021 (see image 1).

In April 2024, the price of the same carton reached 3,500 Cuban pesos, a monthly salary for a state worker (see image 2). These figures are hard to imagine for people living outside Cuba. How can a monthly salary cover only the price of a 30 eggs carton! When the monetary re-structuring was implemented in January 2021, the government adjusted positively the salaries in the state sector (covering a large portion of the population), pensions and social assistance. However, wage increases without adequate supply of goods provoked inflationary pressures (Truebas Acosta 2023).

In addition to the eggs, other proteins are often used as reference to inflation. The price of chicken often comes up in casual conversation. Queli, a cultural worker with a BA degree, is paid 4,5000 Cuban pesos per month. She told us that the day she received her monthly salary, she went to a local mipyme (a small grocery store privately owned) to buy 4 pounds of chicken which cost her exact salary. “We are going to eat chicken for a few days,” she shared with us, “but what about the rest!” she laughed sarcastically. Eggs and other protein products often serve to express the sense of despair associated with the current economic crisis. To collect the most up to date figure of the price of eggs in Cuba to write this blog entry, we sent a message on WhatsApp to a friend in Santiago de Cuba. He quickly responded: “Prices are crazy, easily 3,000 pesos for an egg carton, if you are lucky enough to find one. […] It’s so bad right now, I didn’t eat today, and I had to send my two daughters to the neighbour’s house [who could give them something to eat], it’s so painful.”

Screenshot

Until recently, the Cuban food rationing system sold 5 eggs per month to each Cuban. The price of eggs in the official ratio system remains stable and affordable. According to our data, the price of eggs increased by less than 0.01 US dollars between 2019 and 2024, a huge contrast with the informal economy sector, on which Cubans must rely in order to survive. The problem on the official and subsidized market is not cost, but scarcity. At the time of writing this blog entry, Cubans in Santiago de Cuba had not received any eggs through the official rationing system for the last 8 months. And the scarcity of eggs, and other products distributed through the official system is rampant all over Cuba; it is not a local problem.

Inflation as pressure

In 2005, Fidel Castro distributed 100,000 pressure cookers to Cubans as a response to the growing energy crisis, and to “reassert control over the nation’s economy.” The image of Cubans receiving pressure cookers offers a telling metaphor. Valves of pressure allow tensions to escape, at least momentarily, as frustrations towards periods of shortages grow. Cubans have lived under pressure almost permanently, or as Kapcia (2008) would argue, in a “permanent cycle of crises.” They have learned to luchar (struggle), to resolver (resolve), and to inventar (invent) ways to cope with the shortage of products and information, among other things. Inflation talk Amri argues “bring(s) together atmosphere and affect” or a “sense that something is in the air” (2023:39). In Cuba, economic tensions weight heavy in the air.

Image 3: “Old man, your blood pressure,” says a lady who hides the eyes of a man with a COVID mask who looking at prices of vegetables. Source: Martirena in “Con Filo: Sin desorden antes del ordenamiento,” written by Francisco Rodríguez. Trabajadores, 27 October 2020.

As mentioned, Cubans respond to inflation in various ways, sometimes in telling stories and jokes. But tensions are also embodied. Elsewhere, we argue that different forms of pressure (air, atmosphere, and economic) allow for grassroots (i.e. ethnographic), spontaneous and nuanced understanding of how an accumulation of tensions shapes bodies in moments of crisis (Boudreault-Fournier 2023). Inflation generates anxieties as people face serious material constraints and pressure provides an opportunity for exploring the ways in which people cope, deflect and deal with signs of pressure. Stress and anxiety caused by high pressure (systemic, economic and political) bend bodies in painful ways until they escape, they morph into another shape, or until they explode. To decompress, some Cubans take medical drugs, while others adopt meditative practices, cultivate medicinal plants or join religious groups. Hypertension caused by stress and lifestyle (i.e too much pressure), remains undertreated in Cuba, because of medication shortages (Rojas et al. 2019). This unbearable pressure pushed more than one million Cubans to leave the island in less than three years.

The current economic crisis leads to an increase of pressure. The current situation is worse than the Special Period in the 1990s, an economic crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, that left older generations traumatized. Cubans face unprecedented shortages of fuel and daily long blackouts, in addition to lack of food. The recent economic reforms implemented at the beginning of 2021 combined with other measures adopted by the government to attempt to stabilize the economy, to face serious problems of shortages and to respond to an infrastructural and energy crisis contribute to deteriorating health and life conditions for the Cuban population.

Conclusion

We have conducted fieldwork in Cuba since the year 2000. During our recent trips in 2023 and 2024, we observed a striking loss of confidence towards the government and an unprecedented level of dissatisfaction in comparison to pre-Covid time. The participation of Cubans in the illicit market which dictates the exchange rate suggests a clear transfer of confidence to the informal economy. Conversations about inflation in the street, on social media and through communications technologies show how Cubans have found a space in which they can more actively participate in the Cuban economy, reminding us of the agency of the public in monetary affairs (Holmes 2023). Even if the situation is extremely harsh, and even if many have lost hopes for a better future in Cuba, the informal economy offers Cubans a pressure valve to cope with difficult life conditions and to take action. That is, until the pressure goes up again.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is an Associate Professor at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include media infrastructure, sound, electronic music, digital data consumption and circulation in Cuba. She wrote the book Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (2020), and co-edited the volume Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media (2021).

Mélissa Gauthier is based at the University of Victoria. She specializes in economic anthropology and border studies with particular attention to the interplay between state and society occurring via informal markets. Her work is based primarily along the Mexico-United States border and in Yucatán, Mexico.

References

Amri, M. 2023. Inflation as Talk, Economy as Feel: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Inflation. Anthropology of the Middle East, 18(2), 27–45.

Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine. 2023. “Under Pressure: Catching the Pulse of a Cuban Crisis.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41(3): 392-412.

Estudios Economico de América Latina y el Caribe. 2023. Cuba. Cepal org. https://repositorio.cepal.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/3392278d-b1b7-46de-b047-b0c0d6aa11a9/content

Holmes, D.R. 2023. “Quelling inflation: The role of the public.” Anthropology Today 39: 6-11.

Kapcia, A (2008) Cuba in Revolution: A History Since the Fifties. London: Reaktion Books.

Rojas, N A et al. 2019. “Burden of Hypertension and Associated Risks for Cardiovascular Mortality in Cuba: A Prospective Cohort Study.” Lancet Public Health 4(2): E107-E115.

Truebas Acosta, Sergio. “Inflation in Cuba: An Analysis from the Perspective of the Main Nominal Anchors of Monetary Policy.” International Journal of Cuban Studies. 2023. Vol. 15(2):175-202.

Vidal P, Luis LR. 2024. “Cuba’s Monetary Reform and Triple-Digit Inflation.” Latin American Research Review. 59(2):274-291. doi:10.1017/lar.2023.59

Wiegratz J, Dessie E, Dolan C, Kimari W. M. Schmidt. 2020. “Pressure in the City.” Development Economics Blog. Available at: https://developingeconomics.org/2020/08/17/blog-series-pressure-in-the-global-south-stress-worry-and-anxiety-in-times-of-economic-crisis/

Cite as: Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine and Gauthier, Mélissa 2024. “Inflation as pressure: coping mechanisms from Eastern Cuba” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/alexandrine-boudreault-fournier-and-melissa-gauthier-inflation-as-pressure-coping-mechanisms-from-eastern-cuba/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Eva van Roekel: Money and ruin: hyperinflation and moral loss in the complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela

Image 1: Banknote of 5 bolívar soberano issued in 2021. Photo by author Eva van Roekel

A few months before the Covid-19 lockdowns were implemented globally I travelled to the border between Venezuela and Brazil for a stint of ethnographic fieldwork about the complex humanitarian crisis. By that time more than five million Venezuelans had left the country, and hyperinflation was mindboggling. Inflation had reached more than 9500%, making living and working with the national currency impossible. The steep currency breakdown not only intensified the exodus of millions of Venezuelans, but also a gold rush in the Venezuelan South. At the border with Brazil, many Venezuelans were going back and forth with fuel, food, gold, and foreignbanknotes.

When Covid-19 lockdowns were temporarily lifted in October 2021, I arrived in Caracas for another short field trip. The new bolívar digital had started circulating only five days previously—the digital was the third new analogue currency since 2008 to get rid ofyet anothersix digits. I have only ever once seen a bolívar digital, including during an additional six months stay in 2023. Venezuelans I spoke with over the years did not really care about their national currency anymore. The bolívar digital appeared to concentrate only in subsidized exchanges, tax payments, and public transport. Instead, US dollars, Brazilian reais, Colombian pesos, crypto currencies, and gold are now largely being used for ordinary trade and subsistence. These de facto currency substitutions during the period of Covid-19 lockdowns gave a significant boost to the crashed economy, at least temporarily. With so many different currencies in circulation, I became interested in the way the disappearance of the bolívar as accepted currency also seemed to involve a form of moral loss.

Since 2020 Venezuelans have found multiple ways to get hold of digital dollars through the steep increase of using new electronic payment systems, like Zelle which is – now I paraphrase their website: ‘an easy and quick way to send small amounts of money directly to almost any U.S. bank accounts with just an email or US mobile phone number.’ Without such linkages to the US finance system, Venezuelans were largely excluded from receiving cambio (spare change) at any shop in Venezuela. I have witnessed innumerable conflicts at shops and gas stations around lack of cambio, becauseone is simply forced to top up purchases or receive a bunch of unwanted candy.

Using multiple currencies is not only helpful for payments. Being new to the field of finance and economics, I quickly learnt that inflation is big business. Some of my friends had a remarkable knowledge of which banknotes and cryptocurrencies to trade and when to trade them. I must admit that I found these new businesses a bit of a sour promise from which very few really benefited, and far outweighed the daily frustrations of chronic lack of cambio and the utter confusion of constantly using different banknotes.

These everyday experiences of hyperinflation seem to be embedded in entrenched cultural and historical meanings attached to money and natural resources. What promises and everyday frustrations do people encounter in abandoning their national currency? What can the rapid shift to a multi-currency economy tell us about local ideas of autonomy and self-government? How does present monetary loss relate to previous economic bonanzas in people’s experiences of money? Ultimately, I am interested in what the moral, political, and economic critiques and assessments of “ordinary” Venezuelans around the complex humanitarian crisis can tell us about the moral loss and extinction of certain life forms.

A brief history of hyperinflation and de facto currency substitution in Venezuela

Between 2013 and 2019, Venezuela lost more than 60 per cent of its GDP (Bull and Rosales 2020, 2). The minimum wage plummeted far below the United Nations standard of extreme poverty ($1.25 a day) and, in 2019, nearly 90% of the population was poor or extremely poor. Although any statistic about Venezuela is unreliable, hyperinflation in 2018 was estimated to reach the incredible figure of ten million percent. That is 8-digit inflation.

Venezuela’s economic climate and its national currency is intimately tied to critical natural resources, and oil in particular. As a petro-state since the early twentieth century, Venezuelans are used to steep boom and bust cycles, but the recent runaway inflation has been on a scale unseen even by Venezuelans. It is even said to be the most significant economic collapse-outside of war-in over four decades (Corrales 2019). Yet, the current crisis shows clear parallels with economic crises in the 1990s, when Venezuela also faced the highest inflation rate of the continent (“only” 70 percent) (Coronil 1997).

Since 1983, soaring inflation has heavily affected Venezuela’s economy and its national currency the bolívar. In the early twenty-first century, thanks to another oil boom, inflation became temporarily manageable but was still in the double digits. Governments from this period implemented various new currencies. In 2008, the bolívar fuerte (the strong bolívar) saw the light of day, getting rid of three zeros. The government pegged its value to the US dollars creating immediately a parallel exchange rate market. In 2012 another abnormal inflation started which lasted for more than a decade. This prompted the introduction of another currency in 2018, the bolívar soberano (the sovereign bolívar), getting rid of another five zeros. And in 2021, the government introduced the already mentioned bolívar digital getting rid of six zeros. Formally, both the soberano and the digital were circulating until August 2024 when the government issued a decree removing from circulation bolívar soberano banknotes with denominations of 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, and 200,000. But in practice most analogue transaction happen in foreign currencies or gold.

Conjuring the morality of money

After more than forty years of experiencing inflation, it is fair to say that Venezuelans are used to navigating monetary volatility. The bolívar went from the strongest currency in the region in the 1970s to the world’s least-valued circulating currency in 2018. I do think there appears to lie a difference in degree when it comes to how people experience and assess inflation on their own terms. Double digit inflation is clearly something other than eight-digit inflation for Venezuelans. Ongoing loss of value for the bolívar had caused a form of ‘socially constructed perplexity’ as Matt Wilde (2023, 162) poignantly argues in his recent ethnography on oil politics and the Bolivarian Revolution. Given the chronic history of inflation, worthless money was perhaps still imaginable for some of my Venezuelan friends, but that their oil nation was facing such extreme levels of poverty and hunger baffled almost everyone.

How people position themselves to their currency and relate to money in general is culturally situated as Martin Holbraad (2017, 92) argues for the Cuban case: monetary relationality is also subject to moral change. Like the oil boom of 1973, when norms about money changed due to the immense flow of petrodollars into Venezuela (Coronil 1997, 11), the recent experience of hyperinflation is resignifying how Venezuelans value and use their currency, as part of a larger process of changing social and affective relations with the state and society. It is here where I want to conjure the moral value of oil money. The recent turn in moral anthropology is particularly supportive for exploring questions of moral loss and ethical being in times of runaway hyperinflation because it provides analytical space to explore, as James Laidlaw argued a decade ago (2014, 15), “the role of ethical thought and practice in understanding phenomena that span the range of anthropological topics and ethnographic contexts.”

To explore the ‘local ethos’ around the bolívar and experiences of its loss of value, I am for instance considering what is called a ‘moral exemplar’ in moral anthropology. A moral exemplar is, roughly speaking, not a set of ethical rules but an admired figure through which people cultivate themselves as ethical subjects (Humphrey 1997, 25). Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan independence warrior, can be seen as such a moral exemplar for many Venezuelans. His exemplarity stands for autonomy and self-rule, and the Venezuelan national currency bolívar is named after him (see image 1). However, exemplars do not escape moral change. In the last two decades, Simón Bolívar’s figure has been coopted by Chávez’ twenty-first century socialism. Naming his movement the Bolivarian Revolution, twenty years of chavismo came to symbolize both the region’s rejection of postcolonial forms of oppression and neoliberal dependence (Wilde 2023, 6).

In 2024 Venezuela’s dependence on natural resources has not disappeared, it has instead diversified into other networks of power and oppression, while the process of coopting Simón Bolívar resignified popular cultural attachments to him as a moral exemplar and may have made it easier to abandon a once highly valued currency.

Money and nature

Ethnographically exploring the moral experiences of worthless oil money in Venezuela benefits from a local ethic in how Venezuelans experience and make sense of a powerful myth of a regional abundance of natural resources and tremendously rich subsoils (Peters 2019; Socorro 2021; Strønen 2017). The photo I took of an artwork of a high school student in Caracas in 2023 is insightful here (see image 2). It signifies the current expanding zones of gold mining that are disrupting vital parts of the Venezuela Amazon. The use of worthless bolivares is wrapped around jumper cables as, in the words of the artist, “an intentional critique of the mining activities and the plundering that this area suffers, in the knowledge that there is an eminently economic purpose.”

Image 2: Highschool art project with Venezuelan banknotes, Caracas 2023. Photo by author

This direct connection between land and money is critical to many Venezuelans. Fernando Coronil (1997, 88) has shown, for instance, how during the consolidation of the petrostate in the twentieth century, Venezuela came to be constituted not only by its people but also its main source of wealth—oil was what constituted venezolanidad. Bolívar’s liberalism became likewise grounded in Venezuela’s natural abundance and revalorized the national economic structures and social relations: citizens were not only to participate directly in national politics, but also in its natural wealth. When economies go bust the reverse appears to happen. Not only economic value, but also the moral value and affective attachment to a currency change in times of ruin. After a decade of hyperinflation, Venezuelans are now rebuilding and reevaluating their economic structures and moral relations, an outcome that is still in the making.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Eva van Roekel is assistant professor in cultural anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is author of the monograph Phenomenal Justice. Violence and Morality in Argentina (Rutgers University Press) and the edited volume A Collection of Creative Anthropologies. Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories (Palgrave MacMillan).

References

Bull, Benedict and Antulio Rosales. 2020. “The crisis in Venezuela: Drivers, transitions, and pathways.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 0 (109), 1-20.

Coronil, Fernando. (1997). The magical state: nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Corrales, Javier et al. 2019. “Responses to the Venezuelan Migration Crisis: A Scorecard.” Americas Quarterly July 11, 2019.

Holbraad, Martin. 2017 “Money and the Morality of Commensuration: Currencies of Poverty in Post-Soviet Cuba.” Social Analysis 61 (4): 81-97.

Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. “Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia.” In The Ethnography of Moralities, edited by Signe Howell. London: Routlegde.

Laidlaw, James. 2012. The Subject of Virtue. An Anthropoogy of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press.

Peters, Stefan. 2019. “Sociedades Rentistas: Claves para Entender la Crisis Venezolana.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 108, 1–19.

Socorro, Milagros. 2021. “El emblema de la abudancia.: Prodavinci (September 19). Available at: https://prodavinci.com/el-emblema-de-la-abundancia/ Accessed December 21, 2022.

Strønen, Iselin Åsedotter. 2017. Grassroots Politics and Oil Culture in Venezuela. The Revolutionary Petro-State. Cham: Palgrave McMillan.

Wilde, Matt. 2023. A Blessing and a Curse. Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cite as: Van Roekel, Eva 2024. “Money and ruin: hyperinflation and moral loss in the complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/eva-van-roekel-money-and-ruin-hyperinflation-and-moral-loss-in-the-complex-humanitarian-crisis-in-venezuela/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Sian Lazar and Dolores Señorans: Argentina: inflation, monetary disorder, and political experimentation

Image 1: Milei in the Casa Rosada. Right next to him is Federico Sturzenegger’s book published in 2021. Photo by Irina Werning for TIME Magazine

The election of Javier Milei, a chainsaw-wielding anarcho-libertarian, to the Presidency of Argentina promises to cement Argentina’s status as a prime experimental site for inflation-tackling policies; it also highlights how experiences of inflation can prompt electorates to turn to radical political alternatives. The country has a long history of inflationary crisis, dating back to the 1970s, with the worst episode occurring in 1989 when hyperinflation led to an annual rate of 5 digits. Argentina has changed its legal tender 4 times since the 1980s as a response to inflationary tendencies and the US dollar has become increasingly important for the economic lives of ordinary people (Luzzi and Wilkis 2023). So much so that the market for real estate has been in dollars since the 1970s and some estimate that 2 out of 10 US dollars in circulation outside of the United States are in Argentina, 10 per cent of the total amount of dollars in use worldwide.

By October 2023, a crucial time in the presidential election campaign, annual inflation had reached 140 per cent. News reports described daily price markups in supermarkets and increasing volumes of products being left at the till (an indication of the difficulties customers had in estimating the purchasing power of their money). The US dollar had more than 15 different exchange rates (official and unofficial, for different commodities, credit cards, tourist rates, and so on) and the government capped the number of dollars that could be legally purchased each month, in an attempt to prevent the continuous diminishing of national reserves, deeply affecting people’s capacity to save in the only stable store of value they trust. 

Most striking was the way that inflation, its alleged causes, and proposed solutions dominated public debate and every political party’s platform. But it was Milei who came through with the most extreme discourse, declaring that he would tackle what he defined as a ‘monstrous monetary disarray’ (Milei 2023) by dollarizing the economy and closing down the Central Bank. His rhetoric worked, and although as President he has subsequently been forced to backtrack on a number of his early propositions, including dollarization, he has not held back from what feels to many Argentines like a painful, extreme, and tragic adjustment in their economy and polity. His government has fired over 26,000 public sector workers, kept higher education budgets stable, and refused to increase salaries and pensions even though inflation remains stubbornly high, at a 271 per cent annual rate in June 2024. His focus on ‘deficit zero’ is a classic monetarist recipe for managing inflation and the state, and the IMF and foreign exchange markets seem reasonably content – although they haven’t (yet) given him any actual money.

Meanwhile, in the first half of 2024, poverty levels increased to over 50 per cent, with extreme poverty (‘indigencia’) at about 18 per cent, both significant increases since Milei assumed power. People of all classes have dampened down their everyday consumption, and many are very worried indeed about how they will reach the end of the month. September 2024 saw some early signs of the dollar stabilizing, even going down against the peso (from a high of about 1500 pesos per ‘dólar blue’ illegal rate a few months ago to about 1210 pesos at the end of September). Prices don’t appear to have reduced in the same timeframe, though. And many remain fearful of losing their job. Demonstrators, including pensioners, who protested the government’s refusal to bring the state pension up by an additional 8.1 per cent were tear-gassed, and university teachers and students are mobilizing to demand sufficient budget to keep buildings open and salaries enough to live on. 

Milei does not seem to care too much about the opposition on the streets: university scientists are, he says, members of ‘la casta’ (the political caste), the political establishment that he railed against as a candidate and continues to stigmatize as morally corrupt. Meanwhile, the 87 Congress deputies who voted against the rise in state pensions celebrated with a barbeque at the Presidential residence. The push and pull of a Congress majority that seeks to overturn or blunt the effects of his austerity decrees, street level mobilization (and repression of that mobilization), and continually wild rhetoric from the President is making for a hugely complex and quite inflammable political situation. The need to address inflation has opened up rhetorical and political space for an extreme version of neoliberalism, and at this point we can’t tell where that will end up. If it is successful in bringing down inflation, it will be evident to policymakers elsewhere that monetarist policies can work (to that end at least) but also that they bring with them a significant social cost.

The Return of the 1990s

The situation of painful inflation in 2023 opened voters’ minds to a very colorful character. On a number of occasions during the campaign Milei delivered speeches holding a chainsaw with which he said he would destroy the Central Bank and eliminate ‘la casta’. His followers produced cardboard versions of the chainsaw to wield at rallies (Vásquez 2023). He has described himself as a libertarian and an anarcho-capitalist, and aligns himself with extreme market fundamentalism. He admires Donald Trump and Margaret Thatcher and named his cloned English mastiffs after the US libertarian thinkers Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas. According to some news commentators, he discusses economic policy with his dogs. His speeches during the campaign and since are brash and – to many – vulgar, for example when he recently made an offensive gesture with his right hand during a speech about reducing public expenditure. Not everyone feels the same way about him, though. Depending on who you talk to, he’s an embarrassment, a disaster, a breath of fresh air, or a response to really fundamental exhaustion with business as usual. To many, it is very appealing that he sets himself aside rhetorically from the political establishment. 

Image 2: Carlos Menem campaign photo in 1989 and Javier Milei in 2024

Yet, Milei’s self-fashioning as a charismatic leader is also based on an aesthetic and narrative citation of the figure of Carlos Menem, President from 1989 to 1999. One of Milei’s early acts as President was inaugurating a bust of Menem in the presidential palace with the presence of his daughter, Zulemita, as a front row guest at the official ceremony; he has described Menem as ‘the best president in the history of the country’. Milei even has a similar hairstyle to Menem, a kind of visual intertextuality (Lazar 2015) that we should not overlook from this most symbolically-conscious of political actors. That all matters because of Menem’s relation to earlier periods of inflation. Menem is the main figure associated with neoliberal small-state ideologies and their implementation in Argentina, the ‘strong man’ who controlled the hyperinflation of 1989-1990 through an exercise of neoliberal shock therapy celebrated by the IMF as one of the most drastic in the world. Together with his Minister of the Economy, Domingo Cavallo, he brought both economic stability (via the Convertibility Plan that kept the peso at a 1:1 exchange rate with the US dollar during the 1990s) and its subsequent collapse, in one of the most acute economic crises the world has seen this century (in 2001). By associating himself with Menem, Milei is making the claim that he will be similarly successful; that his economic policies will usher in a similar period of stability and consumption. He is quiet on the subsequent collapse, of course, but that remains at the forefront of his opponents’ minds.

Terminator in Office

The invocation of the 1990s is combined also with a claim to novelty, to breaking with past assumptions, especially about the role of the state. In his first speech as president in December 2023, Milei addressed Congress and the population stating that it was the beginning of ‘a new era in Argentina’. Symbolically, he did not deliver the speech inside the Congress, but rather outside and turning his back on it. After the official speech, he addressed his supporters more directly, saying something that has by now become his trademark: ‘There is no money’. He added: ‘There is no alternative to adjustment and shock’ to the loud cheers of thousands of supporters.

But, despite the emphasis on a radical new approach in terms of the political responses to the crisis, non-linear continuities with the past also became noticeable. And while in rhetoric Milei condemned ‘la casta’, many prominent political figures from the past populate government ranks, including several members of the Menem family –or ‘Menem clan’ as journalist Gabriela Vulcano described them – who were given important political positions.

More important to the way Milei has addressed inflation are the leading economists in his team. Federico Sturzenegger and Luis ‘Toto’ Caputo were both key figures in economic policy-making (both presidents of the Central Bank) during Mauricio Macri’s administration (2015-19) and they are now both Ministers (of Deregulation and the Economy, respectively). In their hands, monetary policy has been focused on reducing the deficit and reaching ‘fiscal order’, terms that are supposed to ‘stabilize’ the economy. Milei also emphasizes privatization as a flagship policy, with arguments that could have come directly out of the early 1990s: that public companies drive deficits, drain public funds, and provide bad services. In a TV interview shortly after winning the elections, he claimed: ‘Everything that can be transferred to the private sector, it is best that it is in the hands of the private sector (…) Because it has been proven that everything that the public sector does, it does badly’. That said, while Menem had been swift in selling state assets and companies, Milei is having less success and experiencing far more opposition to those particular measures. To this day, no sales have actually been agreed.

It’s not clear how far Milei and his allies will be able to proceed in their goal of reducing the state as far as possible to its security apparatus and that which is needed to promote their own electoral goals (a strategy familiar to politicians well beyond just Menem and Milei). The debate has moved slightly on from inflation per se into a broader attack on the very concept of state care and of the public. In an interview given to the US media outlet The Free Press, Milei claimed that he would ‘destroy the state from within’ and compared himself to the sci-fi character Terminator who comes from an ‘apocalyptic future to prevent the advance of socialism’. This destruction is underway through a constant attack on the notion of the ‘public’ and the workers who bring it to life as de facto socialist and therefore evil. It’s a more aggressive version of the attitude revealed in the 1990s comedian Antonio Gasalla’s affectionate caricature of the ‘empleada pública’ (state employee) who extracts a bribe, exerts her authority, and sips mate while citizens queue up outside her office to put through a tramite (bureaucratic task), only for the piece of paper they bring to be ripped up and thrown into the trash once they turn their backs, while their 100 pesos is carefully pocketed.  

While Menem could reduce the fiscal deficit by moving national state expenditure on health and education to provincial budgets, Milei has less room for maneuver. A number of the people around him are instead promoting a more familiar transfer of resources from the middle/lower-middle classes to elites, via taxation concessions. His attempts to block labor rights are currently stalled due to a legal case brought by the General Trade Union Confederation (CGT), and his government’s refusal to meet its legal obligation to provide food for communal kitchens is also being challenged in the courts, with judge after judge ruling against the government. Not many are optimistic about the chances of inhibiting Milei’s worst excesses, but those who are optimistic point to the Legislature elections coming up next year, which might reduce his political legitimacy. Yet, it’s the attack on the state – and on public sector workers and politicians in particular – from which Milei derives much of his popular legitimacy, and it’s that which sounds so familiar to the debates about adjustment and privatization of the 1990s. It is a long-embedded way to understand politics and the state, but even that probably won’t last much longer into the future if prices continue to rise. 

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Sian Lazar is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her latest book is How we Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour (Pluto Press).

Dolores Señorans is Departmental Lecturer at the Oxford Department of International Development. Her research focuses on popular economies and collective labour politics in Argentina.

References

Lazar, S. (2015). ‘“This Is Not a Parade, It’s a Protest March”: Intertextuality, Citation, and Political Action on the Streets of Bolivia and Argentina.’ American Anthropologist, 117: 242-256. 

Luzzi, M., & Wilkis, A. (2023). Dollar: How the US Dollar Became a Popular Currency in Argentina (1930-2019). University of New Mexico Press

Milei, J. (2023). El fin de la inflación. Eliminar el Banco Central, terminar con la estafa del impuesto inflacionario y volver a ser un país en serio.Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Planeta.

Vázquez, M (2023) ‘Los picantes del liberalismo. Jovenes militantes de Milei y ‘nuevas derechas’’’; in Semán, P. (ed) Está entre Nosotros. ¿De dónde sale y hasta dónde puede llegar la extrema derecha que no vimos venir?. Buenos Aires: siglo veintiuno

Cite as: Lazar, Sian and Señorans, Dolores 2024. “Argentina: inflation, monetary disorder, and political experimentation” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/sian-lazar-and-dolores-senorans-argentina-inflation-monetary-disorder-and-political-experimentation/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Harry Pettit: Theft, resistance, and the struggle over cash circulation in Beirut’s platform economy

Image 1: Drivers waiting to deposit money at BOB Finance, photo by author

In October 2023, I sat with Hameed in a café in Hamra in Beirut, nearby his flat. He had just collected his salary, a stack of green 100,000 notes of Lebanese lira that amounted to 12 million (around 130 dollars): “look,” he said despondently, “this is not going to last more than two weeks, the company are thieves.” I asked him how he would survive. Rather than saying out loud, he preceded to sheepishly get his phone out and start typing on the calculator how much money he owed to friends, 42 dollars, 38 dollars, 180 dollars, 72 dollars, he kept going. It came to 500 dollars, but these were only the amounts he remembered at the time.

Hameed had come to Beirut from Syria with his family in 2011, after the civil war broke out. He had worked multiple jobs, without a work or residence permit, in Beirut’s service economy. For the last 3 years he had worked as a driver for the Lebanese food delivery app Toters. Toters has grown rapidly in Lebanon in recent years. Its rise has been stimulated by the multiple crises that have crippled the Lebanese economy: the financial crisis of 2019 and subsequent economic downturn led to its competition exiting the market; the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically increased home delivery; and the Syrian war provided an army of cheap, undocumented Syrian labour.

The financial crisis has had other consequences. One has been the dramatic surge in Lebanon’s cash economy, which went from 14 per cent of GDP in 2020 to 46 per cent in 2022. This has rapidly produced a new set of infrastructures, actors, and practices for storing and circulating money – at a time of rapid currency devaluation and increased dollarization. Companies began operating in cash due to exorbitant bank fees and distrust, money transfer and exchange services with links to political parties have boomed, and new digital wallets (like the company Purpl) are trying to fill the void left by banks.

When I was following the lives of Syrian drivers working for Toters between January and October 2023, I became interested in the ways in which cash was moving around the mini-economy created by Toters, between customers, delivery drivers, team leaders, money storers, and the company itself. What I want to argue is that, by following cash around, we can see how infrastructures of money circulation become a terrain of struggle between different actors (Scott, 2022). In this instance, the circulation of cash became a way for Toters to extract extra value from its racialised workforce and customers. But it also opens up the possibility for fractured forms of resistance and survival for workers.

Theft through depreciation

Between January and April 2023, the value of the Lebanese lira plummeted. It lost 61 per cent of its value to the dollar. Customers ordering food on Toters had to pay in lira – although sometimes drivers accepted dollars and exchanged it themselves for a small extra fee, without the company’s knowledge. Customers paid in cash directly to the drivers as they delivered orders. When a driver collected three million lira, their account was automatically blocked and they could no longer take orders. To reopen it, they had to go to their team leader who waited at the same spot every day to deposit the money, or use BoB, a Lebanese money storage and transfer depository. This took time away from doing more orders. Any missing money – due to theft or miscalculation – always had to be made up by the driver. Once in BoB, this money was converted into dollars and transferred to a bank account in Dubai where Toters’ official headquarters is located.

Image 2: A driver’s account being blocked, photo by author

By doing this, Toters was able to protect itself from the currency devaluation of the lira. However, this was not the case for drivers. Drivers received a basic fee for each order, plus an extra fee based on distance. In addition, when fewer drivers were on the road, delivery competitions were organised by the company: e.g., if a driver did six orders in two hours, they got an additional amount. On a day of no interruptions drivers did 20-25 orders, which produced ten to twelve dollars (500,000-600,000 Lebanese lira) in earnings. The fees were accumulated, recorded on the mobile app and distributed to drivers in Lebanese lira at the end of each month. This delay meant they had to watch helplessly as the value of their labour plummeted over the month – for example in January 2023 drivers lost a third of the value of their earnings. Meanwhile, their expenses such as rent, electricity, internet, food, and petrol were either paid in dollars or went up with the dollar very quickly.

For Hameed, this induced much frustration, as he described while we sat in a café in mid-March 2023:

“I’m tired, I’m tired. The dollar reached 100,000 lira today, it will reach 200,000 as well. [He pointed to his pack of cigarettes] look, 50,000, the coffee 40,000, then petrol is now 400,000 a day, you spend 600,000 easily, and you don’t even make that from orders. I don’t understand why all the expenses like rent and electricity, even coffee goes up straight away when the dollar goes up, but the only thing that doesn’t go up is the salary. The company just makes extra money, the restaurants can raise their prices, but the workers paid in lira are just losing.”

Image 3: A call out on TikTok for drivers to participate in the strike, screenshot sent to author by Hameed

This depreciation was also a problem for restaurants, who had to wait two weeks before getting their revenue from Toters, which at times led to a 20-30 per cent devaluation of the money. As one restaurant owner told me: “[Toters] are worse than Riad Salameh (the former Lebanese Central Bank Governor), all this playing with money, they have an amazing cash flow…you know they told me ‘we are partners’, I said you are my partner in profit only.”

The way in which cash circulation was set up enabled Toters to extract extra value from the drivers and the restaurants. As Hameed mentioned, restaurants were at least able to raise their prices or start pricing in dollars. The organisation of a percentage fee between 20-25 per cent – with the restaurant paying the costs of VAT and discounts – ensured the platform’s income went up automatically. To keep pace with lira devaluation, drivers’ order fees would have had to increase by 155 per cent between January and April. However, for the month of January the fee did not change despite drivers’ complaints. Drivers demanded their salaries and fees be calculated in dollars. At the end of January, they organised a two-day strike through WhatsApp groups, word of mouth, and TikTok. While impossible to know the scale exactly, at its height 900 people were in the main WhatsApp group, and the Toters app was effectively shut down.

Toters tried to break the strike by punitively firing strike organisers and by sending messages telling drivers they had to do a minimum amount of orders or face firing. But eventually, as Toters’ reputation took a hit on critical media channels, it gave a 38 per cent increase in lira with very modest increases following later as the lira continued to rise. However, to compensate, Toters used its digital infrastructure to rapidly increase the delivery fee charged to customers, the vast majority of which went to the platform. Drivers complained that this had the cruel effect of suppressing tips as customers considered the fee the tip. Furthermore, after the order fee increase, for a while Toters stopped organising competitions for additional income, thus further suppressing driver wages.

Borrowing cash to survive

Amidst devaluing incomes, drivers were constantly pushed into situations where they could not pay expenses. Monthly incomes never reached more than 200 dollars, and were more often around 120-160 dollars. This was just about enough to afford food and rent – but the sickness of a child, a broken or stolen motorbike, or an issue at home, as one driver described, would easily break the delicate balance they were living with. One of the biggest issues they faced were the checkpoints set up by the ‘darak’ (Lebanese internal security forces) which, according to drivers, particularly targeted Toters workers because they were known to be undocumented Syrians – thus making them an easy target for bribes. Officers asked for a work permit, then confiscated the bike, which was only reclaimable upon payment of a fine – anything between 10 and 50 dollars.

Image 4: A driver being stopped by the ‘darak’, photo sent to author by Hameed

In this context, drivers needed to constantly borrow money to sustain their livelihood. I was introduced to this situation when I met Hameed in late-February after his account had been closed. I accompanied him to an online gaming shop. He went up to the man at the desk and took 900,000 lira (15 dollars at the time). Hameed then went straight to the coffee shop across the street where his team leader was waiting and handed over 3 million lira. When he came out, he explained how he had taken money collected from the customers to buy a new gas canister. He therefore needed to borrow from his friend to return the money to his team leader. After getting his account reopened, he would work for an hour and then pay his friend back, again from the customer’s money. When I responded in shock, Hameed shrugged and said: “one borrows from another and then one borrows from another, the money just goes around. That’s how it is here” (this is similar to the circulation of debt found by Isabelle Guérin (2014) in South India).

It was very common for drivers to use the cash from customers to pay for both daily expenses and emergencies. The salary disappeared quickly on rent, electricity costs, and food, while tips were highly unpredictable. As a result, the customer money was an immediate source of cash. If depositing this money in a money transfer service such as BoB, drivers would not have to return the whole amount they owed, just make sure they remained beneath the threshold of three million.

While team leaders were also there to collect customer cash for the company, they sometimes helped drivers out. This could be through raising their cash threshold, or reopening their account, but it also included more personal practices. One described such an occasion to me: “one of my drivers hurt his leg, and needed a gel. He came and gave me the customer’s money, but said he can’t work. I asked why he didn’t buy the gel, he said he has no money. So I gave him 250,000 from my personal money.” This team leader described how his positionality helped him act in this way: “management just think the drivers lie, but I know what they go through, so I can help them out. This was a friend situation, not a work situation, in work I am professional. I understand the company can’t become soft, drivers do lie, they can’t give exceptions to people.”

This practice of survival is directly enabled by the fact that money circulation took the cash form. Another delivery company actually formalised this practice of borrowing by lending money directly to drivers, but taking collateral such as a car, bike, or piece of jewellery in case they did not repay, and deducting directly from future salaries. But borrowing from Toters was not enough to meet monetary needs. On some occasions I heard about drivers who had stolen money from the company when they had just collected a huge order. These drivers earned heroic status among others. However, it was extremely risky as the company could mobilise their close connections with the police to locate drivers. For the most part, drivers relied on a network of communal support. This reflects what others have found especially in communities where formalised banking is not preferred (Wig, 2023). This took multiple forms, from borrowing electricity, internet, or food from neighbours, taking products from shops and paying back later, or borrowing small amounts from friends and other drivers. But it also took the form of taking larger amounts of several hundred or thousands of dollars – often from a relative abroad or a driver who had no dependents.

Drivers were therefore always in the process of paying someone back. Sometimes lenders were flexible because they were family or long-term friends. But this flexibility was precarious and open to sudden change. For Alaa, a 21-year-old driver who carried financial responsibility for his whole family, this veneer of stability was lost when several events occurred at the same time. It began with a bike accident that left him unable to work. This meant he was unable to pay the rent. Soon after the man from whom he had borrowed to buy his motorbike demanded repayment. To avoid the threat of arrest or violence, Ahmed gave the bike back until he could find the 500 dollars required. During this period, Ahmed complained about how Lebanon’s economic crisis was reducing generosity: “people are holding on tighter to their money nowadays”, he lamented. Eventually he did manage to scrape together the cash needed, only to quickly meet another request for money; this time from the police regarding a bike he had sold two years before but was still registered in his name – which had now accumulated various fines.

Conclusion

The stories described here demonstrate the vastly different means different actors have to control the circulation of cash. In a context of rapid inflation and currency devaluation, Toters was able to arrange this circulation in a way that enabled them to extract extra value from drivers and customers. They used temporal techniques and flexible digital infrastructures to control the flow of cash to their benefit. To counter this, the undocumented Syrian drivers had little room for manoeuvre – other than risky, arduous tactics such as borrowing, theft, and collective action. Instead, their liveability, and therefore the extractive operation of the company, relied on material and social networks of communal support to acquire the cash they needed.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Harry Pettit is an Assistant Professor in Economic Geography at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is interested in researching the new forms of extraction and livability opening up within late-capitalist systems, with a focus on the MENA region.

References

Guérin, I. 2014. ‘Juggling with Debt, Social Ties, and Values: The Everyday Use of Microcredit in Rural South India.’ Current Anthropology, 55 (9), pp. 40-50.

Scott, B. 2022. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. New York: Penguin.

Wig, S. 2023. ‘Infrabanking: Mobilizing capital in communist Cuba.’ Economic Anthropology 11 (1)l, pp. 59-70.

Cite as: Pettit, Harry 2024. “Theft, resistance, and the struggle over cash circulation in Beirut’s platform economy” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/harry-pettit-theft-resistance-and-the-struggle-over-cash-circulation-in-beiruts-platform-economy/