I seem to remember that a few years back the big ‘thang’ at the AAA was ‘neoliberalism.’ This was, if I recall correctly, after the invasion of Iraq and just at the point when constant talk of ‘Empire’ in both the Hardt & Negri and ‘is America one?’ variants seemed to be running out of steam. Neoliberalism and neoliberal governance — which in the United States seemed to be closely aligned (confusingly enough) with neoconservatism.
I’ll leave others to sort out the labels — my point here is that the publication industry has caught up with the hype — Duke’s 2006 lineup includes not one but two books with ‘neoliberalism’ in the title: Aihwa Ong’s “Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3748-7 and James Ferguson’s “Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3717-7. I find myself very skeptical about both of these books, although I have to admit it is just because of my knee-jerk reaction against The New. My sense is that anthropological theory is more evanescent than ever, and people are constantly hopping around between issues and theorists as if the discipline were some sort of giant academic gallery walk — somehow it seems to me that Agamben (alluded to in the title of Ong’s book), while interesting, just won’t have the same effect on anthropology that Bakhtin, Foucault, etc. did.
In fact if anything, I get the sense that ‘liberalism’, sans prefix, is something people are talking about more and more — a good friend of mine finished the dissertation on the topic, and there are even “syllabi available”:http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=588. The last shall come first, perhaps? At any rate while I’m tempted to pick up Ferguson’s book IMCT (“in my copious free time”), I feel more hesitant about Ong’s. Is anyone else interested in neoliberalism?
no! I seriously hate that crap. The sort of institutional, meta-processual focus of a lot of contemporary anthropology strikes me as way overdue for a feets-in-the-mud backlash. I think Laura Nader was right, 30 years ago, when she said anthros needed to dedicate more energy to “studying up”. but I also think we are at least a decade if not more past the time when showily refusing to “study down” could serve as any sort of badge of honor in the discipline.
In general I’m a critic of both the terms “conservative” and “liberal” and their respective “neo” variants though I don’t have any suggestions for replacements. The potential for meaning within each term is so proliferate and so interwoven that they’re no longer very useful to catagorize things. Is neoconservativism an imperialist movement to spread liberal democracy and especially neoliberal/libertarian/classical liberal political-economic structures of the type endorsed by modern conservatives and resisted in theory but endorsed in practice by liberals-who-aren’t-radicals? What?
I think that there’s a deep contradiction in the heart of liberalism and a deep misusage of the word conservative that has slowly muddled its meaning as some aspects of the two words have essentially traded places.
Anyway, I think “neoliberalism” is one facet of something academia has been talking about since such a thing as academia has existed. Talking about “liberalism” isn’t a new thing either though I welcome any resurgence of addressing the subject directly instead of through a whole host of peripheral concepts as we’ve been doing over the last half a century or two and I’d be interested in a study of what liberalism means now.
I’ve long thought that the conservative/liberal political axis causes more problems than it solves. Especially when “lay people” get involved in the debates. I remember a class as an undergraduate where a student argued that neo-liberal policies weren’t liberal but were in fact conservative. In effect, he was getting the definition of liberal as a political term and liberal as an economic term (as in classic Adam Smith liberalism) confused.
What’s worse is that many people act like these concepts have an “objective” definition when they are in actuality the product of specific cultural and historical circumstances. Conservative and liberal in the 19th century had different meanings than the contemporary usage of the terms. Like red fox I would argue that we need new terms to describe the realities of political and economic policies but I’m not really sure what those terms would be.
Depsite being pessamistic about new terms, I think it might be possible to subsitute neo-liberalism with the term market libertarianism. Libertarians generally favor the policies that are labeled neo-liberal. Of course this might cause its own problems since libertarian can be a politically loade word. Even other alternatives like deregulation, anti-Keynsian,etc. have similar problems.
I’m not exactly sure I get what people’s objects here are, which is not to say that objections can’t be made, of course. But from what little I know of Ong, I don’t think “showily refusing to study down” describes her very well. Also, neoliberalism generally refers to an economic theory that is often enacted into policies. It’s not really possible to “study down” in many parts of the world without taking those policies and their downward effects into account.
Rex, perhaps a little clarification on what bugs you about neoliberalism? Is it the word itself, which is what seems to be under discussion now?
(And just ’cause: Kupilikula is my favouritest ethnography to deal with the downward effects of neoliberalism)
I’m with Carmen: What’s the question that we’re answering here?
I’m a fan of Ferguson’s work and the book you mentioned just arrived, so maybe if people want to read it we could have a chat.
There are and have been a set of projects of reform and whatnot that can be usefully if loosely glossed “neoliberal,” and they deserve more careful study than they’ve gotten.
Where David Harvey treds, anthropologists follow.
David Harvey’s book came up on SM some time back (I miss Tak!) and at some point last year I discussed a talk by Aihwa Ong I attended in Taiwan. In that I said: “Ong seemed to take the ideological rhetoric of neoliberalism at face value.” Which makes me less than interested in her book. Ferguson’s is probably something I’ll read though.
As far as I can tell what is happening, “neoliberalism” has simply replaced “globalization” and the earlier “postmodernism” as a catch-all phrase to describe the process of social change that is happening around the world. Postmodernism ran out its usefulness fairly quickly – the whole concept of “late capital” overlooked how many people are laboring in conditions that are quite archaic, as well as the whole “informal economy” thing. Globalization was equally problematic in that it overlooked important ways in which the world was actually more “global” in the late colonial era than it is now. It also implies a certain degree of homogenization which hasn’t exactly come about. Words like “glocalization” were compromises at best. Neoliberalism has the advantage of focusing attention on a more specific set of policies – the so-called “Washington Consensus.” A particular vision of modernity that is hegemonically being forced upon the world. It is this vision that French students and South American countries are resisting. I’m not sure that all the scholars using this term are using it in this way, but it does seem to have some use-value in this context. I’m sure it has its problems as well, but I think we need to first explain why people are attracted to the term before we start tearing it to shreds.
I personally don’t have anything against the terms ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ and I think they make perfect sense — but only if you have some understanding of their history and use. Like most dichotomies they’re not very useful without context. Yes: to use terms, especially in pairs, you have to understand the way they mean different things in different contexts. C’est la vie.
I guess that’s why I dislike the idea of ‘neoliberalism’ — it reminds me of the seventies/eighties (I think) tendency of the New Left to constantly refer to ‘late Capitalism’ which was basically another way of saying “now.” In both cases, we have a term without a lot of analytic bite which results in confusion — what _is_ neo- about neoliberalism, for instance? Not to say that there isn’t something, but I’m waiting for an account of what it is, one that actually moves the discussion forward.
I have nothing personal against either Ferguson or Ong, both of whom I have met only very briefly. But I just get the feeling that there is something careerist in these books — an attempt to make sure that one is on top of ‘the hot new thing’ regardless of what that thing is and whether or not it will ultimately prove worthwhile. Perhaps this is particularly true with Ong?
I think one of the thrusts of the post is that between the time they wrote the book and the time it came out the topic had already stopped being Cool. But this is probably an unkind way for me to think since both Ong and Ferguson are very smart and I haven’t read a SINGLE WORD of either book.
But then again perhaps I’m being totally unfair
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 and that, now publishing their works during a period when lots of people prefer to talk about empire (capital or lowercase e), they are probably somewhat uneasy about reporting yesterday’s news. I really don’t think that neoliberalism sounds too much like “the new” these days.
That said, I think that neoliberalism is a fine frame for anthropological analysis. As Kerim hinted, unlike the awful “globalization,” which sounds like some kind of natural reducing of distance (who could object but a xenophobe?), neoliberalism puts the focus not only on a specific set of policies imposed on much of the world, but on the different ways in which people tend to imagine politics post Cold War. It’s also not just about “studying up” or “institutional, meta-processual” analyses. For those of us interested in studying the ways in which politically imaginative downtrodden people (and peoples) tend to think about the things that are politically possible and desirable since the end of history failed to improve their lots, some big and general term that captures the (almost worldwide) official “free-market” consensus is necessary. “Neoliberalism” captures this at lest as well as any of the going terms that I know. And given that (along with “anti-neoliberalism”) it happens to be a pretty widely used native term in much of the world, it should have plenty to offer for the “study-uppers” the “study-downers” and everyone in between.
I agree with all of Kerim’s post.
If “neoliberalism” is being used as a synonym for “globalization” that’s obviously a problem. But unless Ferguson has lost his mind since the superb _Expectations of Modernity_ we have little to worry about. I haven’t read any Ong since _Flexible Citizenship_, but that was a really smart book too.
Picking up on Rex’s question about what is neo about neoliberalism, I’ll self-plagiarize an older SM posting. As far as I can tell “neoliberalism” comes out of Latin America in the 1980s. Here’s my earliest cite: Foxley, Alejandro. 1982. “Experimentos neoliberales en América Latina”, Colección Estudios CIEPLAN, nº 7 (especial), Santiago, marzo. Foxley is drawing heavily on Chilean policy and thought in the late 1970s. In Latin American, where people remembered 19th-century liberalism and its expression in Liberal parties, “neoliberal” made rhetorical sense. (The term has *nothing* to do with “neoconservative” in the sense that it emerged in the U.S. in the early 1980s, although that has confused a variety of people, including the publisher who translated Foxley into English.)
In addition to the Chilean economists I would emphasize Bela Balassa, Deepak Lal, Ian Little, Anne Krueger, and Jagdish Bhagwati. Whatever you think of it, a lot of neoliberal thought comes out of places like Latin America and India and policy debates there. So one loses a lot by ignoring that link and trying to make it a mere continuation of 19th-century European liberalism.
And there is a coherent body of doctrine that emerges in the 1980s and a process of policy reform in a lot of places linked to it. I did a dissertation on one aspect of neoliberal reform in Mexico. (This is also why I would have doubts, though, about neoliberalism as a “frame.” I understand it as a real-world phenomenon, ideological and practical at the same time, and one which is less hegemonic than you all seem to think.)
Precisely how the term became popular in English I don’t know, but I think there’s a lag of a decade or so, and I’m pretty sure the link is via the economic policy literature.
And Rex, *any* academic book or article is careerist in the sense that that’s how you make a scholarly career. You’re trying to have it both ways: first you accuse Ferguson and Ong of trendiness. Then you assume they were trying to be trendy and and slam them for failing to achieve trendiness.
Read the damn books and go after people for what they actually write. It’s not hard.
I think the “neo” in neoliberalism is pretty clear: we’re talking about the Reagan/Thatcher resurgence of classical political economy (as against a mid-century Keynesian consensus)-at least that’s how I read the word. But the question (and here I think I am concurring with Ozma) is whether picking out that fact identifies the most salient feature of the “now.” That’s the claim that’s being made (in turn) by all those words: that the shape of the now (the things we analyze/explain/interpret) are the way they are because the now is “postmodern” or because we are “living under late capitalism” (I like to think of it as early-middle capitalism myself), or because of “globalization,” or “neo-liberal governmentality” or indeed because we are at the “end of history.” The last reference is meant to allude to one of my hesitations regarding the terms: the whiff of Hegelian historical stages which seems to me to cling to any attempt to characterize the state of the world as a whole. (To be fair this is less true of “neo-liberalism” than of the others). But my main questions are about things like whether we are justified in taking the self consciousness of capitalists as an adequate analytic description of capitalism, whether indeed government functions the way Foucoult’s ideas of governmentality and biopower suggest. In at least some of the work that thematizes “neoliberalism” these connections are assumed more than they are argued. Hence I agree that what is needed is ethnography. Some of it is being done—e.g. the work or Ortner, Urciuoli, & Traube (among others) on discourses around “success” in the US. I, for one, would argue that weddings—as ritual performances of the possibility of upward mobility—have more to do with sustaining capitalism as a lived and valorized cultural system in the US than any neoliberal economic discourse.
Rex-
The funny thing is, I also haven’t read anything of Ong’s in years and still have more or less the same gut feeling: some anthropological writing on neoliberalism ends up looking like an echo of neoliberalism, not critical analysis. That’s not to say the writers aren’t being critical, which is the odd part: I think the problem has to do with the interpretive practices they’re using, not the object of study.
You get an interesting perspective on this kind of disciplinary problem if you work with activists, because these are people who will flatly say “first we were trying to understand neoliberalism, now it’s neoconservatives. But neoconservativism here doesn’t look anything like it does in the US, what the hell’s going on?”
So what do you do if utterances like that are what your field subjects are saying, and part of what you’re supposed to ‘get under’?
So 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.
Speaking from experience as an anthropologist, an adman and a political activist, I would say that our discussion here reflects a continuing muddle. Our nineteenth century paradigms are increasingly out of touch with reality, and one way to see the force of this claim is to examine what’s been going on in domestic politics in the USA and, in particular, the internal politics of the Democratic Party. During the Howard Dean campaign, in which I was myself an enthusiastic participant, many people self-identified as “progressives” loved the Governor’s antiwar stance but seemed to forget that, before going public with that stance, Dean had been a Democratic Leadership Council poster boy, a governor who got the message that working with business and market forces to create public goods was a far more effective way to govern than manning barricades and tarring all corporations as evil empire builders. A lot of people who got on board the first great blogosphere-driven campaign still saw the world in workers vs. capitalists/poor vs. wealthy, come the revolution terms. But a lot of others were “progressive” in an older, 19th century, mid-American sense–middle-class folks fighting to break up monopolies, regulate business to prevent abuse, support public education and healthcare and kick out corrupt politicians, not to create a utopia but, instead, to create institutions that would make a middle-class lifestyle a realistic possibility and let them get on with their middle-class lives. (Hey, I’m one of these people!)
It is interesting to me that both calls to study up and calls to study down avoid the obvious–the call to study people like ourselves, whose lives make us neither poor and downtrodden nor malefactors of great wealth. Thus, while I agree with Kerim, that Aihwa Ong writes in a style that only the most precious postmodernist could love, I found her earlier book Flexible Citizenship most interesting. If nothing else it replaced the conventional up-down/exploiter-exploited binary opposition with three categories: the cosmopolitan globe-trotting elite, often holders of multiple passorts, for whom the world is our oyster; the stay-at-home middle class who have a peculiar importance as the primary constituency for the governments of nation states; and a global lumpenproletariat, the poor bastards born in parts of the world where a dollar a day is living high, who eat shit to survive and are treated in ways reminiscent of the worst days of Victorian/panoptical/child labor capitalism. Given these categories, it quickly becomes apparent that most political disputes involve the first two categories, with the latter referenced primarily as an awful warning to the middle class of what could happen to them if they don’t fall in line.
Here, however, anthropological theory seems strangely silent. Or maybe I’m just ignorant. It’s been a long time since graduate school, and I can’t claim to have kept up in any systematic way. I keep on hoping that some day I will stand corrected.
>It is interesting to me that both calls to study up and calls to study down avoid the >obvious—the call to study people like ourselves, whose lives make us neither poor >and downtrodden nor malefactors of great wealth.
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?
Keep in mind that what I’m about to say is wholly impressionistic. Inside the campaign, latent differences were ignored as people got caught up in the collective excitement, at times even what Vic Turner would have called communitas. In Tokyo, for example, I saw an ex-Green Beret software entrepreneur become good friends with a geologist who described himself as a “revolutionary green socialist.” Inside vs. outside was another story. I know a good many older Democratic activists who consider themselves progressives who reacted pretty badly to new folks pouring in and accusing them of being reactionaries because they didn’t support Dean. Reports of similar problems, with clashes between Deaniacs and local party oldtimers popped up frequently on the Net.
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.
I don’t think Colin’s criticism of me is quite fair — first, its silly to claim that there’s no such thing as careerism just because all anthropologists have careers. That’s like saying there’s no such thing as gluttony because we all have to eat. Second, I’ve never made any criticism of Ong or Ferguson BECAUSE I haven’t read these works and have never claimed otherwise — this entire blog entry has never been framed as anything other than asking what other people thought because I myself am not informed on this topic.
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?
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.
For what it’s worth–from an email sent to me in 2003 regarding my dissertation precis:
“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.
Can I just say stop, please? There are in fact a number of real geneaologies for neo-liberalism (I don’t know as much as in the case of neo-conservatism). One is most certainly the Latin American and Indian economic debates that Colin refers to in the 1980s: search any catalog or database and you will find the earliest discussion of neo-liberalism deals with debates that were red-hot in the development, structural adjustment and economic reform literature of the time. But there is a much older and much more specific geneology and that’s Hayek, who in the course of distiguishing himself from, well, pretty much everyone, from the 1930s on began to call himself a neo-liberal. Just in case anyone actually wants to read any Foucault–especially any Foucault that uses the term “bio-politics”– his lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics are in fact an excellent geneaology of neo-liberalism after WWII–in particular Frankfurt School “ordo-liberalism” (not that Frankfurt School, but this is a point he dwells on at length). The attempt, in the wake of WWII to design institutions that would maximally disperse, if not eliminate, centralized state planning were obsessions of both Hayek and the ordo-liberals. The American ground-zero of academic neo-liberalism was Chicago Economics in the 1960s (A good diagnostic question would be: did, for example, Gary Becker, Richard Posner, or Milton Friedman call themselves neo-liberals then? do they now?). Foucault’s claim is that the neo-liberalism of the “Chicago School” was in fact another “technology of the self” that gave people the tools to fashion themselves as entrepreneurs in a very, very expansive sense (cf. eg. Becker on marriage or drugs). That, I think is the reason why anthropologists are interested in this strand of neo-liberalism.
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.
Stop what? I think this is a hugely interesting thread. I especially liked what AGSG said in (11):
>>>>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.
“what I want to know is why NEOLIBERALISM intersects with witchcraft”
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.
Quick points before I go read the next thread.
— 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.
Carmen — Hmm, that point about organ transactions is actually quite interesting, and I get what you mean. Also I will put _Kupilikula_ on my “intend to read” list, as I am sure my pavlovian reaction to “neoliberalism” is not always a perfect mechanism!
carmen, if that happened to me I would be unable to resist the urge to rebut “Well on that note you have an option here, and I’m going to give you free choice so by your theory it should be fair: agree with me or fail my class. Your move, student.”
red fox, that would require me being able to overcome my shock to be witty. I think I just stood there with my mouth open for a sec 🙂
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 🙂
I find the reflection of ‘fashion’ and/or ‘reception’ in inner academic contexts highly interesting. Just really, I doubt the method to deliver data for any argument.
A comparison of syllabi (“what do they teach?”) e.g. would be more telling.
great overview of many strands, perspectives, and issues to bear in mind. Definately better than Anthropology news 🙂