General Posts

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… more...

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… more...

Oane Visser and Nina Swen: COP29, Climate Politics and Caspian Fisheries

Image 1: COP29 International Climate Change in Baku, Azerbaijan, illustration by Zulfurgar Graphics By hosting the UN’s global Climate Change conference COP29 in Baku (11-22 November 2024), Azerbaijan presents itself as a climate-responsible oil state and new political ally and donor for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) struggling with the impacts of climate change. Yet… more...

Walden Bello: The October Surprise

Foreign policy played a minor role in the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in September. The vice presidential exchange between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz on October 2 barely touched on it. Yet less than a month before the US elections on November 5, it is foreign policy that may upend the… more...

Marc Edelman: Make America Think Again

Image: White Sulphur Springs, NY, photo by author MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN. That’s the bumper sticker on my friend’s pickup and that’s what I hope for. I like evidence and data, and I detest TV talking heads, “alternative facts,” and political zealots of all stripes. I want people to think about policies and how these… more...

József Böröcz: Out of Place

Spectators at the final concert of the World Social Forum, Mumbai 2004 (author: Claudio Riccio, https://www.flickr.com/photos/ilriccio/135304963/in/photostream/) From Andheri to Goregaon—it’s five kilometers. Half an hour by Ambassador in the north Mumbai traffic. Windows down—through them, the usual fumes: chai, wood smoke, diesel exhaust. Plus, the blinding, crunchy, almost chewable dust of the industrial area, a… more...

Walden Bello: The Mess in Argentina

Image 1. Javier Milei signing controversial emergency decree containing liberalization reforms on 20 December 2023. Photo by Presidency of Argentina At the heart of Buenos Aires lies the lovely Calle Florida. The experience of walking through this street that is exclusively dedicated to pedestrians was anything but lovely though since in the one kilometer from… more...

Julia Soul: Between Confrontation and Silent Discipline: Working-Class Dilemmas under Javier Milei’s Far-Right Government in Argentina

With the triumph of Javier Milei in Argentina’s November 2023 national election, the country has followed the contemporary global trend of electing far-right governments. Through his frequent television appearances as an “economic expert”, Milei successfully mobilized voters against the country’s dominant political elites, which he denigrated as “la casta” (“the caste"). Ordinary Argentines, in this… more...

Susann Kassem: Israel’s Looming Threat: Death, War and Displacement in Lebanon

Israel's wall and de facto border with southeast Lebanon. Writing reads: "All resistance for the sake of Jerusalem." Photo taken by author in summer 2023 near Adaysseh, Lebanon.  “I cannot listen to the sound of the warplanes anymore, it sounds like they are flying over our roofs,” as a resident of a south Lebanese border village described the… more...

Letter of support for Prof. Ghassan Hage from Israeli scholars

12.02.2024 Prof. Dr. Patrick Cramer, President of the Max Planck Society Old Town, 80539 Munich, Germany CC: Dr. Ursula Rao, Dr. Biao Xiang, Dr. Marie-Claire Foblets MPI for Social Anthropology, Halle Dear colleagues, We write as Israeli Jewish scholars, working in Israel and worldwide, in support of Prof. Ghassan Hage and in protest of the… more...

Antonio De Lauri: The Courage of Historical Truths

With the destruction of Gaza by Israel under way and the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territories worsening day by day, a recurrent question is raised in mainstream media, TV shows and many academic circles: Is Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks on October 7 proportionate or not? Some say it is. Others say… more...

Menara Guizardi: Notes on the Political Capitalization of Anguish and Hope in Argentina (and the American Southern-Cone)

In recent work, several authors in anthropology have analyzed how the extreme right is being configured and acquiring a considerable pull on the mainstream (see: Kalb, 2023a; Semán & Wilkis, 2023, https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/05/11/pablo-seman-and-ariel-wilkis-rebellion-of-the-bastards-the-rise-of-the-extreme-right-in-argentina/). I want to take their reflections further and focus on the uncomfortable question about the role of “traditional” political forces in paving the… more...

Markus Balkenhol: Apologizing for slavery: notes on a Dutch surprise

On 1 July 2021, 148 years after slavery ended in the Dutch West Indian colonies, Femke Halsema, the Mayor of Amsterdam, said: ‘For the active involvement of the Amsterdam City Council in the commercial system of colonial slavery and the global trade in enslaved people I, on behalf of the College of Mayors and Aldermen,… more...

Chris Hann: Thanks, Türkiye

How does Recep Tayyip Erdoğan do it? In Spring 2023, the economy is in a mess, inflation accelerating, and corruption rife. Government aid in the wake of a devastating earthquake in Southeastern Anatolia on 6th February was badly mismanaged. The natural disaster revealed the structural shortcomings of poorly regulated construction and real-estate markets, symptomatic of… more...

Tomaso Ferrando: Beyond Speculation

On May 21, 2022 the cover of The Economist left no space to the imagination: a set of skulls replaced the grains of a wheat straw, and the world was soon going to experience a ‘Coming Food Catastrophe’. Although there is no doubt that the prospect of world food security looks anything but pleasant, I… more...

Gavin Smith: Peru: the Uncertain State

Zavaleta: “[Apparent states] appear to be Western… in all respects but somehow they are not. What misfires here is a structural concept of sovereignty that is ultimately incompatible with the condition of non-centrality in the world, at least in history such as it has occurred until now…. They have only a vague sense of self-certainty,… more...

FocaalBlog: Eric Wolf, Europe, Histories, Capitalism. Where are we now?

This panel was convened by Ida Susser at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2022 - Unsettling Landscapes. It builds on the workshop Vision and Method in Anthropology: Forty Years of Eric Wolf’s ‘Europe and the People Without History’, on 23/24 September 2022, organized  in the framework of the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project at the… more...

Valentina Napolitano & Kristin Norget: Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State

At the end of July, a remarkable event unfolded in three distinct but significant sites in Canada. Pope Francis, the Argentinian current supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, travelled to Maskwacis, Ste. Anne de Beaupré and Iqaluit on his “penitential pilgrimage” in Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for North America), an historic visit intended… more...

Ida Susser: Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc

On June 19, 2022, the united left party, NUPES (New Ecological and Social Popular Union), cobbled together by Jean-Luc Melenchon in less than two months, won enough seats to become the official opposition in the French National Assembly. How should we understand the growth of this left alliance in France which seems to have taken… more...

Khin Thazin and Stephen Campbell: How the Myanmar coup has impacted migrant workers abroad

The February 2021 military coup in Myanmar put an end to the country’s ten-year period of quasi-civilian electoral rule—the so-called democratic transition, as it was optimistically called. Since then, nation-wide anti-coup protests, a violent military/police crackdown, and the emergence of a decentralised armed resistance movement have garnered extensive international and domestic media coverage. Far less… more...

Gavin Smith: ­­­Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour

Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations] for the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems.” (Kaminer, 2022). A task preliminary to operationalizing the concept, however, is the task of clarifying what it refers to.… more...

Matan Kaminer: Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop

I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part of the Frontlines of Value research group at the University of Bergen. The workshop, featuring participants of different generations, academic fields and geographic specializations, was educating and… more...

Chris Knight: Wrong About (Almost) Everything

A review article on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Allen Lane, 2021. The Dawn of Everything’s central idea is challenging. We are told that humans are politically adventurous and experimental – so much so that after a spell of freedom and equality, people are inclined… more...

Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne and James Taylor: State and crisis in Sri Lanka and Thailand: Hearing but not listening in the Theravāda Buddhist world

Although historically and geographically diverse, but sharing religious cultural roots, contemporary Sri Lanka and Thailand are both characterised by authoritarianism. This parallel cannot be explained as simply due to both countries being Theravāda polities. Nevertheless, dominant politics in both countries express elements of conservative ethno-Buddhism, within the cultural markers of national identity and contested political… more...

Rafael Wainer: COVID-19: Complicity, complacency, and connections

Image 1: Social distancing signs. Photo by ©Acabashi CC-BY-SA 4.0 To understand the massive world-disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic we need a sociology of complicity. Since the different waves hit the planet, we have been hearing repeatedly two crucial phrases: 1) “we are all in this together” (or the opposite: “we are not in this… more...

Sandro Mezzadra: Intersectionality, Identity, and the Riddle of Class

Identity and class While identity is of course a fundamental category in European philosophy at least since Aristotle, its politicization is a much more recent phenomenon. One can say that it is only in the second half of the 20th century that the development of cultural anthropology and sociology lays the theoretical ground for such… more...

Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy

David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his scholarly legacy is slowly emerging. I want to contribute to such a critical assessment of his oeuvre by concentrating on his book “Utopia of Rules” published in… more...

Steven Sampson: Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism

QAnon, Deep State, pedophile plots, George Soros, stolen elections, 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, 5G penetration, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers… We slow-working, ever so reflective anthropologists are being inundated with one conspiracy theory after another. A May 2021 survey reveals that 15% of Americans and 23% of those who call themselves Republicans believe that ‘the government,… more...

Paul Stubbs: Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Image 1: Shows Tuzla Plenum, 2014 (Photograph by Tamara Opačić from H-Alter, 17 February 2014, http://h-alter.org/vijesti/plenum-je-uvijek-korak-ispred, Used with permission). The space where I live and work is described and prescribed by its past, by what it no longer is: post-Yugoslav, post-socialist, post-conflict, some even claim post-colonial. This world is rarely framed in terms of what… more...

Aliki Angelidou: “It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn

On February 22nd police forces entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating many students, arresting 31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff. Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting against a new bill on “Admission in higher education, protection of academic freedom, and… more...

Juzimu: Jack Ma: Wherever the Wind Blows

One day last October, I happened to spot an acquaintance’s post on Wechat. It was a simple message thanking all ‘Ant-izens’ (people who work in Ant Financial of Alibaba) for their hard work, followed by a short video advertising Ant’s upcoming IPO. It came from a data scientist who had given up his high-paid job… more...

Remembering Leith Mullings (1945 – 2020)

Image 1: Leith Mullings Official Website; an invaluable repository for Black feminist anticapitalist anthropology (Screenshot from page; http://leithmullings.com, 17 Feb 2021) Leith Mullings, Social Justice Anthropologist Jeff Maskovsky, City University of New York Leith Mullings’ death is a terrible blow to anthropology – and a heartbreaking loss to those of us who were lucky enough… more...

Stephen Campbell: What can workers expect in post-coup Myanmar?

International media coverage of the February 1st military coup in Myanmar has been rather consistent. The focus, overwhelmingly, has been on the detention of State Counsellor and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, with speculations about the political machinations of Myanmar’s commander-and-chief, Min Aung Hlaing. In this way, the developing story has orbited around the… more...

Lesley Gill: Can the Left Revive the ‘Pink Tide’ amid a Global Pandemic?

As Covid-19 has washed over Latin America like a tsunami and the pillars of shaky economies have shuddered under lockdowns, the priority of profits over public welfare stands out in starker relief, restating the need for effective public policies and demanding government intervention more than ever. Such an unprecedented moment poses strong challenges for the… more...

Nicole Weydmann, Kristina Großmann, Maribeth Erb, Novia Tirta Rahayu Tijaja: Healing in context: Traditional medicine has an important role to play in Indonesia’s fight against the coronavirus

The first two cases of COVID-19 in Indonesia were announced on 2 March 2020, quite late compared to other countries. The first patient was a 31-year-old woman who came into contact with a Japanese citizen – who later tested positive – at a dance event in South Jakarta. She then passed it on to her… more...

In Memoriam: David Graeber

https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/1268281502875422721 David Graeber at a protest in London, June 3rd 2020 David Graeber: Anthropologist and Revolutionary David was the most important anthropologist of his generation and by far its most brilliant and effective public intellectual. He reached wider audiences than anyone of us, possibly even larger than Margaret Mead in anthropology’s heydays. His message was… more...

Vita Peacock: The slave trader, the artist, and an empty plinth

On 7th June 2020, the bronze statue of Edward Colston in the English city of Bristol was pulled down by Black Lives Matter protesters with a rope, rolled a short distance down the road, and dropped into the harbor with a gurgle. Colston was a merchant who became rich in the late seventeenth-century selling sugar,… more...

Richard H. Robbins: The Economy After Covid-19

Richard H. Robbins, SUNY Plattsburgh One feature of both the economic recession of 2007/2008 and the present Covid-19-induced economic collapse is increased central bank bouts of quantitative easing. The U.S. Federal Reserve, after pumping about $500 billion in the economy in 2008 is adding $2.3 trillion as of April 2020, while the European Central Bank… more...

Don Nonini: Black Enslavement and Agro-industrial Capital

Don Nonini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Insa Koch’s recent (2020) FOCAAL blog, “The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain,” reminds us that enslavement and the bodies of black people are profoundly interconnected, and the link to challenges to “the punitive turn” and police abuse in the UK by the Black Lives… more...

Insa Koch: The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain

Insa Koch, London School of Economics States' claims that they are relieving human suffering have become a central element of their ongoing liberal legitimation amid their production of deepening inequalities. The British government's modern slavery agenda in relation to “county lines” provides a case in point. County lines is the name given by the police… more...

Mao Mollona: Fully Exterminated Communism, or Anthropology in the Time of Cholera

Mao Mollona, Goldsmiths College, London One thing is sure. If just briefly, the pandemic struck at the heart of capitalism. It paralysed the economy, broke the bureaucratic machine of nation-states and forced conservative governments worldwide to pass quasi post-capitalist policies which, only a few months earlier, were considered too radical even for the radical Left.… more...

Don Kalb: Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations

Don Kalb, University of Bergen At some point in late January I told my family over WhatsApp with the Marxist bluster they usually enjoy from me that if Covid was to come to the West it would be the end of capitalism. Wuhan was already in lockdown and a red alert was sounding for many… more...

Gavin Smith: Rereading Marx on machines in the time of COVID-19

Gavin Smith, University of Toronto “One of the many perils lies in normalizing the ‘batshit crazy’ presently underway.”—Wallace, Liebman, Chavez & Wallace 2020: 5 The COVID-19 pandemic has stripped the veneer off capitalist society whether in its softer social democratic version or its bare-faced pseudo Darwinian version. Both the cause and the cure are down… more...

Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber: “A Matter of Priority": The Covid-19 Crisis in Indonesia

Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber, University of Cambridge COVID-19 is wreaking havoc in Indonesia. The government ignored the crisis for too long, relying on a dubious religious discourse of divine protection. When it finally reacted, its response was unsystematic and favored economic stability over health and welfare measures. Although the government has neither imposed a strict lockdown nor… more...

Ramesh Sunam: The Precariousness of Migrant Workers in Japan amidst COVID-19

Ramesh Sunam, Waseda University, Tokyo Suraj (name changed), arrived a year ago from Nepal to study at a Japanese language institute in Nagoya, Japan. He was working part-time at a convenient shop to make a living. Unfortunately, Suraj’s situation has changed in the last two months following the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19). In March,… more...

Sandro Mezzadra: Politics of struggles in the time of pandemic

A prolonged wait at the pharmacy, a long queue before entering a supermarket. Experiences like this, today increasingly common, can help us to see how the spreading of Coronavirus is transforming our society. Yet, more precisely, the global pandemic, and the measures put in place by the Italian government to attempt to counteract it, are… more...

Mario Schmidt: “In Pipeline, Panic is Unnecessary” – How Poor Nairobians Deal with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic

Mario Schmidt, University of Cologne Mototaxi drivers wearing face masks, supermarkets obliging customers to wash their hands before entering, hawkers selling indigenous vegetables as prophylactics against COVID-19, and strangers running away from me shouting “Corona, Corona, Corona” only to smile and break out in laughter—these are all strategies that inhabitants of Pipeline, one of Nairobi’s… more...

Ståle Knudsen: Debts and the end for infrastructure fetishism in Turkey

The immense new Istanbul Airport, additional spectacular bridges over the straights, the Marmaray metro/train tunnel under the Bosporus, high-speed trains, highways, extension of the Istanbul metro network, energy projects. These were highlights in a campaign video for the Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidate Binali Yıldırım in the rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election in… more...

Stephen Campbell: Touring Myanmar’s leftist history

For more by the author, see his article "Putting-Out's Return: Informalization and Differential Subsumption in Thailand's Garment Sector" in Focaal, freely available to all readers until 22 May 2019. Opening his 1990 political history, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Burma, the Bangkok-based journalist Bertil Lintner summarized the then recent end to… more...

Heiko Henkel, Sindre Bangstad, and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen: The politics of affect: Anthropological perspectives on the rise of far-right and right-wing populism in the West

This is the first part of a panel held during the 2017 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. The second part is freely available to all readers in the most recent issue of Focaal here. Over the past decade, the dramatic ascendance of ethno-nationalist and right-wing populist movements and projects has been reshaping… more...

Focaal Volume 2019, Issue 83: The anthropology of austerity

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 www.berghahnjournals.com/focaal. This issue's theme section—"The Anthropology of Austerity," guest edited by Theodore Powers and Theodoros Rakopoulos—posits that austerity is an instantiation of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and thus must be revisited in two… more...

Joshua Clover: The roundabout riots

Much has been written about the gilets jaunes and their relation to both politics, of the left and the right, and historical waves of labor unrest. In this article, Joshua Clover argues that the gilets jaunes are in fact a texbook example of a contemporary riot and may be best seen as an early example of… more...

Cemile Gizem Dinçer and Eda Sevinin: Migration, activist research, and the politics of location: An interview with Nicholas De Genova (part 2)

The second part of this interview with Nicholas De Genova moves into an analysis of the so-called refugee crisis since 2015 and possibilities for militant academic research that challenges the increasingly hard-right consensus in Europe and beyond. The first part is published here and traces De Genova’s intellectual biography, the question of militant research, his… more...

Flávio Eiró: On Bolsonaro: Brazilian democracy at risk

Picture a street handcraft market in a touristic village called Porto de Galinhas in Pernambuco, Northeast Region of Brazil. A few days before the second round of the 2018 presidential elections on 28 October, I observed the following conversation on the market. “You can vote for him, don’t worry, he won’t kill gay people,” says… more...

Thomas Strong: Dispossession as historical allegory: Observing Dublin’s housing crisis

In Dublin today, an intensifying housing crisis is provoking a dramatic public response. Activists, spearheaded by groups like Dublin Central Housing Action, occupy empty properties, draping banners from windows sarcastically proclaiming “10,000 welcomes from 10,000 homeless.” They organize tenants to contest illegal evictions, door knocking in neighborhoods where renters are precariously subject to landlord whim.… more...

Focaal Volume 2018, Issue 82: Capitalism and global anthropology: Marxism resurgent

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 www.berghahnjournals.com/focaal. This issue's theme section—titled "Capitalism and global anthropology: Marxism resurgent," guest edited by Patrick Neveling and Luisa Steur, and  coming out during the two hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth—discusses the distinctiveness… more...

Massimiliano Mollona: Authoritarian Brazil redux?

On Sunday, 7 October, the Brazilian people will go to the polls to elect their next president. There has never been such a dramatic election since 15 January 1985, when Brazil returned to the polls after 20 years of dictatorship (1964–1985)—although voting took place still within the electoral college system put in place during the… more...

Vlad Schüler-Costa: Academic precarity and the false coin of our own dreams

A specter haunted EASA2018—the specter of precarity. Like a “frightful hobgoblin” (that, one could argue, is a more suitable, if inaccurate, translation of Marx’s Gespenst), it appeared in some instances as an explicit, publicly acknowledged political program (on some panels and the ending plenary) and, at other times, stashed away in the interstitches of the… more...

Bruce Kapferer: The Hau complicity: An event in the crisis of anthropology

Hau is a phenomenon. It burst on the scene of the relatively small academic scholarly world of anthropology capturing scholars from around the globe into its spirit. Hau rapidly established itself as a premier journal in the discipline with an increasing defining role for anthropology. It was becoming a power in the field legitimating reputations… more...

Fiona Murphy: When gadflies become horses: On the unlikelihood of ethical critique from the academy

Something smells of bullshit. It has for a long time. Caught in the spectacular entanglements of the neoliberal university, academic work is being actively “bullshitized." Audit cultures, the intensification of administrative duties, the politics of intellectual egos and academic “assholery,” hierarchical academic freedoms, an exploitative publishing industry, and an increase in zero-hour contracts means the… more...

Don Kalb: HAU not: For David Graeber and the anthropological precariate

When HAU was launched, my grad students at Central European University were celebrating. Open access! Finally, a breach in the wall that separated the haves from the have-nots. Their local universities in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe hardly had the resources to pay for these Western journals offered at extortionate prices by the likes of… more...

Patrick Neveling: HAU and the latest stage of capitalism

As anthropology assesses an increasing number of reports about abuse, bullying, sexism, and financial misconduct and fraud at its now shooting-star journal HAU, it is important to keep a few basics in mind. First, capitalism feeds on the exploitation and superexploitation of workers. Labor relations across the globe have always been ripe with abuse, bullying,… more...

Charles Dolph: The second time as farce? The IMF returns to Argentina

Argentina’s Mauricio Macri administration unexpectedly announced recently that it had opened negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a Stand-By Arrangement amid intense monetary and financial instability—with the Argentine peso losing roughly 25 percent of its value in a two-week period, the Central Bank of Argentina was forced to sell $10 billion in reserves… more...