I arrived in London on 10 July, a few weeks after the Brexit referendum. I was in Parliament the following day—the day Theresa May was named the new prime minister.
Reading about the situation is one thing; dealing with it ethnographically is another. I have no idea how to proceed, nor do I trust my initial observations. So this post with its provisional assertions should be read with circumspection.
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EU immigration was the primary source of contention in the debates surrounding the recent referendum about the United Kingdom’s EU membership. The “leave” campaign continuously bombarded the public with warnings about “uncontrollable hordes” of EU benefit seekers (for a discussion on the construction of migrant categories, see Apostolova 2016) planning to permanently settle for the “easy” life in the UK and take away the jobs of the locals. Likewise, the “remain” campaign promised to crack down on the number of immigrants and further restrict the rights of newcomers. In this way, both camps reinforced the perception that immigration from the EU, and in particular from eastern Europe, is a problem. Furthermore, in their effort to make the case for a “remain” scenario, academic voices tirelessly demonstrated the economic, cultural, and demographic benefits of EU migration. Such efforts, however well intended, still feed into an instrumentalist policy perspective that constructs migrants’ lives as only important in terms of their added value for the local economy.
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Against the predictions of the last polls, a narrow majority of the UK voters decided to leave the EU. Once again, the political crisis of Europe has deepened. And once again, it does not seem as if this deepening of the crisis will force a fundamental reorientation of the “European project.”
In the following, I take issue with a mainstream framing of the crisis as one engendered by an atavistic nationalism that haunts the cosmopolitan present of Europe, a framing that directs attention away from the class character of European state-making of the past decades. If the EU is not to disintegrate, however, the latter has to be challenged.
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We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology has recently published and is available online at its new home, www.berghahnjournals.com/focaal.
On 30 April 2016, a group of anthropological heavyweights congregated at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London), under the aegis of a workshop entitled “The gift that keeps on giving.” The workshop, organized to launch Jane Guyer’s expanded edition of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (2016), brought into being the third English translation of this much-cited text. As the latest offering from open-access publishing house HAU Books, the event also marked the start of a partnership between HAU and the SOAS Centre for Ethnographic Theory (CET).
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We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology has recently published and is available online at its new home, www.berghahnjournals.com/focaal.
This issue’s theme section, titled “After dispossession” and guest edited by Oscar Salemink and Mattias Borg Rasmussen, addresses how seemingly global processes become entangled in local affairs in sub-Saharan Africa, a former Soviet republic, and Latin America. The editors’ introduction is available to all readers for free, and “Reclaiming the lake” is also temporarily free as a part of Berghahn’s Earth Day virtual issue.
Focaal 74 also includes a regular articles section and a forum piece by FocaalBlog’s very own Edward Simpson. As always, forums are freely available to all readers.
THEME SECTION
After dispossession: Ethnographic approaches to neoliberalization
Oscar Salemink and Mattias Borg Rasmussen
Reclaiming the lake: Citizenship and environment-as-common-property in highland Peru
Mattias Borg Rasmussen
Infrastructures of progress and dispossession: Collective responses to shrinking water access among farmers in Arequipa, Peru
Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen
Enemies of the people: Theorizing dispossession and mirroring conspiracy in the Republic of Georgia
Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen
Foregrounding possibilities and backgrounding exploitation in transnational medical research projects in Lusaka, Zambia
Birgitte Bruun
ARTICLES
“Communists” on the shop floor: Anticommunism, crisis, and transformation of labor in Bulgaria
Dimitra Kofti
Humanitarian mine action in Burma/Myanmar and the reterritorialization of risk
Ken MacLean
It was horrible, but we live now: The experience of young German adults in everyday encounters with the Holocaust
Lisa J. Krieg
FORUM
Is anthropology legal? Earthquakes, blitzkrieg, and ethical futures
Edward Simpson
Recommend Focaal to your library
As a key researcher in your field, you can recommend Focaal to your library for subscription. A form for this purpose is provided on the Focaal website here.
Enduring Uncertainty is a volume of the “Dislocations” series published by Berghahn Books. The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neoliberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks, which reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically incisive responses.
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Regional elections in Germany have seldom if ever attracted as much attention as they did on Sunday, 13 March 2016. This was the first opportunity for the electorate to express its opinion about the “refugee policy” pursued by Chancellor Angela Merkel since early September 2015. Not only her own Christian Democratic Union but also the Social Democrats, her coalition partner in Berlin, lost votes to a new protest party, the Alternative for Germany. These “Rechtspopulisten” did especially well in Saxony-Anhalt, where I live. Rather than simply join the chorus of condemnation of this vile movement and celebrate the humanitarian altruism shown by the mainstream parties toward deserving foreigners, it behooves social scientists to analyze the deeper causes and consequences of both the voting and the migration patterns.
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Since 2012, we have carried out twelve months of urban anthropological research in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city and its economic and cultural center. Until February 2016, however, we had not once visited the country’s capital, Naypyitaw, a planned city of immense size. It had not been a priority for our work, but we also had not been really keen on visiting: when the former military government began to relocate the capital in November 2005, away from cosmopolitan, multireligious, multiethnic Yangon, located at the mouth of the Andaman Sea, to a previously more or less vacant inland area, most commentators had been dismissive, bemused, or outraged.
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Whenever there is armed conflict, sexual violence and rape, often against women and girls, soon emerge as central concerns in the global public. This is an important topic, as rape is often used as “a weapon of war.” It is a dangerous concern, nevertheless. Opposing war parties commonly develop public relations strategies aimed at exploiting the global concern over sexual violence. Further, “rape as a weapon of war” may be a false assumption, for it may overshadow other atrocities inherent in nearly all armed conflicts and the focus may be on rape as a selective phenomenon separated from the political and economic context.
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