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And Omza, I’ll confess to having a similar reaction to neoliberalism as a topic, but being a grad student I don’t always get to choose my own reading. I’ve been forced to discover that there is some decent stuff being written on the topic :)

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– I wouldn’t assume neoliberalism is the consciousnes of capitalists. Individual capitalists, as Adam Smith pointed out, will try to get the state to protect them against competition. And real-life capitalists are a pretty varied lot, as Ong points out.

– I have no idea what a “moment in anthropology means.” Phrasing questions in these terms is an effort to push discussion back toward fashion and superficiality.

– Foucault’s stuff on the ordoliberals is interesting, and the genealogies are not necessarily separate.

– I’ve started reading the new Ferguson and it’s quite good. It’s a collection of essays, much concerned with anthro that’s not confined to one place, a long-time Ferguson interest.

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I reiterate the awesomeness of Kupilikula.

Omza, would it be fair to suggest that you are interested in the meanings that people give to their lives and experiences, whereas you’ve found that studies of neoliberalism focuses too abstractly on contexts?

Here is something that I’ve been thinking about and trying to understand for the past few weeks (since I read the discussion on teaching about insemination to undergrads):

My students this past year had a much, much more difficult time with the suggestion that a “fair” market transaction of organs might not represent “free choice” on the part of the seller than they had with their introduction to insemination rituals. This was in response to a Schepper-Hughes article that specifically identified neoliberal ideology as the underlying justification for the organ trade and suggested that it might not be the only way of looking at notions of fairness and freedom.

My students and I were virtually unable to communicate over this issue. It took me three weeks to figure out what their objection was, and in the discussion someone said that the choice between dying of starvation or selling an organ represented real free choice and should be considered a legitimate reason for entering into a market exchange of organs.

I bring this up, I guess, because I see this as evidence that neoliberalism is becoming, at least for some, a part of their lived human experience. My students’ understanding of the world and of social interaction has been deeply shaped by the ideologies that justify liberalizing markets. There is meaning-making here as well as context-making.

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>>>>while I don’t think ‘neoliberalism’ is nonesense, or a white whale, (it refers to concrete and specific market deregulations, political language, etc), I think it’s slightly wrong to try to ‘clarify’ it, because it’s a politically mobilized term. It’s not a rigorous theoretical formulation, nor can it be, because it’s already invested with a bunch of deeper anxieties and desires: about the new, about internationalism, about the cold war, etc.>>>

Which makes geneaologies like the one Ckelty offers relevant but hardly conversation-stoppers.

Anyway, what bothers me about the relentless invocation of “neoliberalism” (and I loved Comet Jo’s anecdote about someone being grateful NOT to have to read about it in a recent thesis…) is that it seems to me to flag much more about an author’s positioning within the discipline than it offers anything interesting to go on vis-a-vis the particular context of their research. This may be just me, but I would NEVER pick up an ethnography to learn something about “neoliberalism” because “neoliberalism” is not a rich and specific expression of lived human experience. “neoliberalism” may inform/structure/influence/construct/constrain/and so on rich and specific expressions of lived human experience — & it may be, for many contexts, absolutely necessary to describe the relevance of “neoliberal” policy annd ideology during the course of an ethnography. Fair enough, no objections.

but when an author nails it to the masthead of their work: “this is a book about NEOLIBERALISM in Indonesia, or Ghana, or Mexico, or Canada” I can feel my brain glaze over; I immediately suspect that author’s instincts/attentions are not in the right place. what I want to know is why NEOLIBERALISM intersects with witchcraft in one place and multiplying manifestations of patriotism in another. perhaps unfairly, when I see NEOLIBERALISM smack out in the title I suspect that I’m going to end up slogging through a lot of poofery about governmentality rather than something quite meaty about (say) hockey games or (say) poison oracles. It just strikes me as not a promising sign if “neoliberalism” ranks too highly in the author’s proclamation of aims. Probably this means I miss some good stuff, but all of us have selection mechanisms given limited time to read outside our subfields.

It’s weird, actually, that in an age when master narratives are supposedly out of fashion that so much anthropology still seems to produce Grand Unifying Theories of Everything while simultaneously denying that they are doing so. Give me a nice little essay about joking relationships over a peroration on neoliberalism any day of the week.

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That being said, I have no idea whether either of these are the genealogy of Ferguson or Ong. I’d have to go look…

an interesting side note, gleaned from Tim Mitchell’s recent talk at the SCA, is that Hernando deSoto, one of Latin America’s most well known “neo-liberals” was a protoge of Hayek.

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“it was nice to read a precis that wasn’t centrally concerned with neo-liberalism!”

Evidence for something or other surely, but I will leave it to other’s to determine what.

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First of all, plenty of anthropologists have been analyzing stuff in terms of neoliberalism since at least the mid-1990s. I haven’t read either the Ferguson or Ong book, but I would guess that their neoliberalism research predates 9-11-2001

This is an important point. Trying to ask why certain books are appearing now may be a question that can only be answered by asking why editors and publishers thought that they would be viable four or five years ago and why the authors were interested in the topic before that.

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Colin is right, though, in that my gut instinct is that they are attempting to achieve trendiness and failing. However why he thinks this is a problem with (rather than a summary of) my position is unclear. You can ‘accuse’ someone of being trendy and then revel in their failure without contradicting yourself!

But I don’t mean to do that. To be clear I’m not faulting Ferguson or Ong. — I quite enjoyed Expectations of Modernity, since I DID just finish a dissertation on development and mining in a postcolony! Let me try rephrasing: is this conjunction of stuff indicative of a moment (perhaps passed) in anthropology? And if so, why are these two well-known authors thinking about it now, given that (as many of the comments on this channel have indicated) ‘neoliberalism’ has probably been around for decades?

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My thesis about 2004 is that it marked a significant shift in US politics with three different strata grinding against other. The oldest is the classic, pre-TV, machine politics stratum, exemplified nowadays by the unions on the Democratic side and the right-wing churches on the Republican side. In this stratum, politics is personal and tied to membership in local grassroots organizations.

The middle stratum is the post-TV mass media campaign. Here I follow Hedrick Smith, who in a mid-80s book titled The Power Game discusses what TV had done to American politics. By allowing candidates able to raise their own money to speak directly to voters over the heads of the old machines, TV undermined party discipline, eroded the power of state and big-city parties, and trapped candidates, especially those in the House of Representatives where terms are only two years, in a constant rat race raising funds to pay of the debts from the last election and create a warchest for the next one. As an ad guy, I noted to myself that it also transformed campaigns into classic mass marketing exercises. Instead of the smoke-filled rooms of yore, where local party bosses cut their deals and hammered out their differences (great descriptions by the way in David McCulloch’s Truman), “the campaign” was now a collection of hired guns, pollsters, strategists, PR and advertising people who worked out among themselves how to “package” the candidate and the candidate’s message then told people in the field to “stay on message.” By activating the blogosphere in the way that it did, Dean’s campaign inverted the TV-campaign paradigm. The Internet made it possible for the “netroots” to interact with unprecedented freedom and intensity. I remember quipping to someone that while John Kerry had a couple of dozen professionals working on his campaign, Dean had over 20,000, scattered all over the country, coming up with their own ideas and feeding into the frenzy.

In terms of power relations, the pre-TV machines are weaker than they used to be. But the unions’ ability to get out thousands of foot soldiers to canvas and get out the vote still makes them essential. (As mentioned above, the right-wing churches play a similar role on the other side.) The TV-campaign consultants and those who depend on them are the ones most threatened by the Netroots-style, Internet campaigners. As my friend Jerry Bowles, the founder of bestoftheblogs remarked, what the Dean campaign proved was that in 2004, the netroots were still less than 13% of the electorate. But as the Net continues to spread and becomes a universal presence in more and more people’s lives, the power of the Netroots will grow (as long, that is, as Network Neutrality insures equal access).

The real hit for the consultants was, however, the demonstrated ability of the Netroots type to raise big money in thousands and millions of small donations, money on a scale that makes organizations like MoveOn players that can’t be treated dismissively.

That’s where the main battle is now, between the TV-campaign types and the Netroots, with the pre-TV machines torn between going one way or the other. Notice the split in the labor movement with the SEIU, for example, siding with the Netroots while other unions stick to their old allies, politicians elected by TV-style campaigns. Neither side is predominantly “on the left” in a classic “workers of the world unite” style. But neither are they “on the right” in a classic “the masses are a great beast” mode.

Both largely, if often unconsciously, accept George Soros’ thesis that the market is the greatest wealth generator in human history but has nothing in its nature to guarantee either justice or production of public goods. Both would probably agree with Jesse Jackson Jr. that the market is a powerful engine; but a car also needs good brakes and a functioning steering wheel, ideally with someone competent sitting in the driver’s seat. Their battle assumes this context. It is neither a rebellion against it or the start of a revolution designed to change it radically.

That is anyway how I see it. Hope this is helpful.

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I totally agree. If you don’t mind being asked a rather sprawling question, when you were working for the Dean campaign, how did you see the relationship between the older-style progressives and younger, more politicized/radicalized/whatnot people play out?

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