But Rex, no! This is not based on a rigorous definition of populism! As Ernesto Laclau informs us, populism essentially and universally involves 1)chains of equivalence among signifiers, 2) a moment of indetermination 3)partial hegemonies and totalities and 4) must, when you cut through the verbiage, vaguely resemble Peronism in Argentina in the 1960′s and 70′s, which of course doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that that’s where Laclau was living at the time.

But seriously, folks-

I think Rex’s point was just that you can talk about the existence of fashion without getting wrapped up in the question of whether or not Academic Fashion is Bad-did he not say that or did I miss it?

You have the same thing, in slightly more abstract form, with the theory feeding frenzy over Agamben-lots and lots of people trying to Find Homo Sacer in India, Japan, The People’s Republic of Symbonia, wherever. The only thing that’s going to ensure the quality of the work over time is the quality of the reading people did of Agamben.

Whether people are seriously thinking about what it means for social theory to be antifoundational, or the history of human rights, or the role of sacred power in the modern State, is a deeper question.

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Sean, I also agree with you & would sometime like to hear about what São Paulo is like right now.

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Also, without any list of Jstor 1s to back me up I’m going to assert my general sense that anthropologists are much less likely to use neoliberalism as a meta-historical-key-for-explaining-everything than they were pre 9-11-2001/ Iraq war, etc. Military power has just become too obvious since then to sustain those narratives. I could be wrong on this, though.

Finally, and I touched on this in my post on the previous thread (posted just as stm—I’m new to this whole blogging/ posting business and uncertain about the kind of internet persona I’ll adopt, but to hell with anonymity…), I’m sympathetic to many anthropological uses of neoliberalism (although I don’t tend to use it in my own work), because they often don’t use the term simply to talk about economic policy, but rather to think about political imagination in a world in which something like socialism is seldom on the plate. People often use neoliberalism somewhat vaguely to talk about the ways in which politics and culture are shaped in an era in which political respectability and responsibility tend to mean respecting the liberalization of capital. I do think that this is somewhat less true about political respectability and responsibility than it was 5 years ago, but (despite the rise of anti-neoliberalisms) it’s still a massively significant feature of the post Cold War era, with all kinds of everyday cultural and political ramifications. I think that this has been mostly missing from this discussion and I think that it’s what a lot of anthropologists gloss as neoliberalism when they are studying whatever kinds of culture and politics.

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I agree completely with this and I think it’s an interesting question. I still don’t see how you can determine the answer to this question by looking at frequencies of words in a title.

I think that Grad Student Guy has given us a good example of the kinds of conclusions that you can draw from frequencies of a word in a title, which are considerably more narrow in scope than the questions that either red fox or Rex have posed.

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I’ve already spent too much time lately bemoaning words but here goes: I’m also uncomfortable with “globalization” though I have to admit it’s entered my usage only as of late, after it was even Cool. I’ve never used “late capitalism” but I have used “hopefully late capitalism”.

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No just kidding.

I hope that Colin participates in the summer reading circle I announced above, in which I promise to focus on what people read and write and not anything else.

Also GSG has done some interesting work. Apparently ‘neoliberalism’ perhaps has a briefer genealogy than the Reagan/Thatcher version some mentioned earlier. It’s also interesting to see what way in which anthropology’s research interests _aren’t_ unique and are quite tied to other disciplines, and to the area studies of individual anthros fieldsites.

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Sociology
1980 1
1981 1
1982 1
1983 11
1984 111
1985
1986
1987 111
1988 1
1989 1
1990 1
1991 1
1992 11111111
1993 111
1994 11111
1995 1111111111
1996 11111111111111
1997 1111111111111111
1998 1111111111111
1999 1111111111111111111111111111
2000 11111111111111111111111111111111111111
2001 11111111111111111111
2002 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111
2003 111111111111111111

African Studies
1980 to 2006 77 using neoliberal 25 neoliberalism (may be overlap)
Asian Studies
1980 to 2006 43 using neoliberal 19 neoliberalism (may be overalap)
Middle Eastern Studies
1980 to 2006 14 using neoliberal 9 neoliberalism (may be overlap)
Slavic Studies
1980 to 2006 40 using neoliberal 9 using neoliberalism
Latin American Studies
1980 to 2006 836 using neoliberal 484 using neoliberalism

So what does this information tell us.
1. Rex’s conclusions about neoliberalism being important to people studying Latin America do appear to be correct.

2. That being said, in the “general” literature of social sciences, we can observe a trend of increasing scholarship on neoliberalism post-Soviet Union in political science and at about the same time in sociology in anthropology. This makes me wonder whether the trend in anthropology is in actuality a response to political science literature or a larger trend in social sciences. If its part of a larger social science trend, then we have to examine factors beyond those within anthropology.

3. Finally, we don’t know about anthropologists who publish in area studies journals (or for that matter “generic” social science journals). I’m sure that among those 484 Latin American Studies articles that there could be many anthropologists using neoliberalism. It’s possible that we are only witnessing the migration of these anthropologists from area studies journals to “mainstream” anthropology journals. (I’m too lazy at the moment to do absolute date breakdowns for the area study journals or examine the disciplines of individual authors).

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“NAFTA was signed in 1994 (by Clinton). So the first peak of results we get from 1998-1999 is almost certainly a result of that.”

By ‘almost certainly’ you cannot argue anyway.

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I’m not factoring in the area studies journals in this, because they seem to full of sensible and intelligent scholars. Instead I want to study those SLAVE TO FASHION ANTHROPOLOGISTS despite my TOTAL IGNORANCE OF THEIR WORK.

But seriously. Searching for the keyword ‘neoliberalism’ on JSTOR’s ‘advanced search’ through all the ‘anthropology’ journals it has results in 79 hits (note I’ve not checked that N actually adds up to 79 here — this is just a very rough tabulation):

1991 1
1992 111
1993 1
1994 1
1995 11
1996 1111
1997 111111
1998 111111111
1999 111111111
2000 111111
2001 111111
2002 11111111111
2003 1
2004 111
2005 111111111
2006 1111

I don’t know whether the moving wall of content on JSTOR biases these results — for some journals they do include them in their catalog and search and just link to fulltext elsewhere. So, for instance, American Anthropologist is included in the 2006 results. A quick look at the search:

http://www.jstor.org/search/AdvancedResults?so=OldestFirst&si=1&hp=100&All=neoliberalism&Exact=&One=&None=&xc=&sd=&ed=&jt=&dc=Anthropology

reveals that many of the hits from the late 1990s have to do with Mexico and Latin America. NAFTA was signed in 1994 (by Clinton). So the first peak of results we get from 1998-1999 is almost certainly a result of that. Or so I would imagine since I HAVEN’T READ ANY OF THOSE ARTICLES AT ALL AND AM TALKING ABOUT THEM WITHOUT CITING THEM :P

Next question: how does that initial interest tie to a post-9/11 interest in it?

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Asking whether “neoliberalism” has been adopted as a catch-phrase to grab attention at the conference book-stands verses whether it articulates something useful and of genuine interest to anthropologists is a worthwhile question. However, I don’t think that you can get at an answer without some knowledge of the literature. If “neoliberalism” refers to something that is analytically useful, then the increase in its use could simply reflect that: it is useful, therefore more people use it.

On the other hand, if people are beginning to use the word to cover such a wide variety of things that its analytical use has been compromised (or if it was never particularly illuminating) then we can say that this is likely a trend and represents a “fashion” in anthropology that may be of limited usefulness and staying power.

However, neither case can be established by noticing the word in titles. It would require a sampling of the literature to understand how the term is being used and whether newcomers are simply tacking it on or whether they are illuminating something interesting with it.

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