Tag Archives: Theory

Anthropological “isms,” post and otherwise.

Retroboasians and Antiretroboasians

My intellectual training in anthropology was veddy veddy British — I managed to get a BA in anthropology without reading anything by Boas (much less Benedict!) but I did read all of The Andaman Islanders (excepting the ‘technical appendix’). As a graduate student, I studied at a department notorious for bucking the Boasian tradition and I worked with someone who was a protege of Leslie White. So perhaps you can just write off my enthusiasm for the Boasians as the zeal of a lately-converted convert.

That said, I do think the ‘retroboasian’ (neoboasian?) turn exemplified by the AAA special issue on “A New Boasian Anthropology: Theory For the 21st Century”:http://www.anthrosource.net/toc/aa/2004/106/3 and Regna Darnell’s book “Invisible Genealogies”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0803266294&id=lwqYG0VJC7UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=invisible+genealogies is extremely fruitful and right-headed. So it was with great interest that I noticed recently that Michel Verdon has set himself up as The Great Antiretroboasian. His work (as far as I know) consists of two articles, “The World Upside Down: Boas, History, Evolutionism, and Science”:http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?id=np47u6t84n362n51 and “Boas and Holism: A Textual Analysis”:http://pos.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/3/276. Has anyone read these pieces? I know that some retroboasians frequent SM and I’d be interested in seeing what they have to say. My own impression of Verdon’s work is that it’s quite gallic in its opposition to this recent work. But it also, given the very quick reading of it that I’ve done, seems to be operating with a different jargon than that used by retroboasians, and one that seems cryptic to me.

Opinions, anyone?

Ethnography as sapiental text?

In the century or so that anthropology has been around it’s often found itself on shifting ground in terms of it’s disciplinary relations. The discipline itself is saddled with a commitment to holism which many are uneasy about, and it’s external relations have changed as well. I spent the other day hunting down the original version of Edmund Leach’s paper known as either “Genesis as Myth” or “Levi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden” — it originally appeared in the Transactions of the New York Academy of Science, an institution that today that I doubt would treat structural studies of myth as on par with biochemistry. Some of cultural anthropology’s adjoining disciplines are old neighbors: linguistics, geography, history, sociology, comparative religion, psychology. Others liasons — with literary criticism or cultural studies — are more recent. Given our discipline’s incredible mutability it’s not surprising that we read very widely and have done for some time.

The other day at a party I managed to have a word or two with Roger Ames, one of the major forces in that corner of philosophy that is interested in bringing East Asian philosophers into dialogue with continental philosophy. One thing he said to me which really struck me (one of many — he’s a very interesting and person) was that Eastern (read ‘Chinese’) philosophy had never given up on Wisdom, while the Western tradition had taken a pass on widsom and settled for the lesser goal of knowledge. I was struck by this because it is, to a certain extent, true. We have plenty of what we call ‘sapiential texts’ in the Western tradition, of course, but these are typically considered to be ‘religious’ rather than ‘philosophical.’

At the same time, there has always been a current in the ‘Western Tradition’ of ‘applied’ or perhaps ‘sapiential’ work — think of Aristotle, for instance, or the ‘Mirrors for Princes’ literature from (iirc) the Renaissance. Although we don’t talk about it much, many social scientists have the sense that their study makes them wise of more deeply human — I think, for instance, of the absorption of phenomenologists and other European thinkers into the American sociological tradition that produced books like Kurt Wolf’s Surrender and Catch. And of course anthropology as a discipline is fixated on the way that one’s personal perspective is altered and enriched by the experience of -culture shock- fieldwork.

For complex reasons I have no interest in attempting to knit together the Western and Chinese philosophical traditions (for a start, I’m not interested in the boundary maintenance needed to stabilize either as a canon). But I am always interested in the way that issues fall between the cracks of disciplines or, perhaps , get divided up between them. Thinking about the fate of wisdom in the philosophical tradition and its (re)location in social science really did make my brain open up for a moment, though.

Any thoughts?

Should we outsource anthropology?

I just got back from the latest Allen Chun production at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica: “Culture in Context: Pragmatics, Industries, Technologies, Geopolitics.” Allen regularly hosts thought provoking interdisciplinary conferences. One cool Savage Minds connection was made this year, as frequent SM commentator John McCreery was the chair on one panel and I was the discussant on another.

My panel was entitled, “Flows and Boundaries, Real or Imagined,” and I had the honor of discussing papers by George Ritzer and George Marcus. Allen instructed us to discuss all the panel papers together, rather than taking them each separately. With one paper a survey on outsourcing, and the other a meditation on anthropological methodology, it at first seemed like an impossible task; however, I decided to have some fun with it and people seemed to enjoy the result. Since the papers are available online, and all my references are online as well, I thought it would be appropriate to post the full text of my discussion here on Savage Minds.

I urge everyone to please take the time to read through Ritzer and Marcus’ original papers before reading my commentary since it was written with a certain contextual setting in mind.
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Making ‘The State’ feasible

A bit ago I posted an entry on “traction and feasibility”:/2006/08/28/traction-and-feasibility/ and was about to do a follow up when I got distracted by crispiness and Latour. But there was a circle I was going to close there and so I thought I’d do it now.

Describing how ‘the Ipili’ became feasible requires an understanding of the way in which a particular individual comes to represent a collectivity. This means doing things like examining how the idea of the group is deployed in different circumstances, ethnogenesis, invention of tradition, politics of representation in both the epistemological and political sense, yadda yadda yadda. We — or at least I and my homies — are all very used to the idea of examining all the clockwork behind the seamless appearence of “ethnic group X”. The achieved nature of ‘the Ipili’ is easy for us to see because we are all used to the idea of ethnogenesis and the complex nature of the recognition of indigenous peoples and their representation by one group or another. But clearly this same account of feasibility could be made of any representative of any big actor. We could think of the state in these terms, for instance. How does ‘the state’ come to appear as a taken-for granted entity?

The reason that I mention all this is its relation to my earlier entry on “spatliazing states”:/2006/08/24/spatializing-states/. The potential problem with Ferguson and Gupta’s approach, it seemed to me, was the way it conflated the metaphorical space people used to imagine the state, the use of these metaphors amongst people to organize themselves as representatives of ‘the state’, and finally the analysts judgment about the success of these metaphors to structure actions such that ‘The State’ as an achievement might be said to be controlling a sector of space (for instance, a country or a city) at any particular moment of time. Another way of saying this is that these sorts of analyses of ‘The States’ relationship with indigenous people are asymmetric in that the work that goes into examining how ‘the local’ or ‘the indigenous’ or ‘the grassroots’ or whoever is intimately analyzed while the achievement of becoming ‘The State’ or ‘The Global’ is taken for granted.

Perhaps I am picking unfairly on Gupta and Ferguson here, since it is a little unclear what exactly they intend to do — on the one hand they want to thematize a previously taken-for-granted ‘governmentality’ (again, the sexy language is an issue here). On the other hand they seem to use ‘the State’ as an unproblematically existing actor in their narratives. A better target is James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like A State” which attributes the faculty of vision to an entity which, strictly speaking, lacks eyes. Although the complex processes by which local people are ‘made legible’ is demonstrated, the process by which ‘The State’ itself is made a feasible actor (there’s the word from the previous entry — feasible) is rarely touched on. We have no account of the middlemen who make up ‘the State’.

(Of course given Scott’s left-populism ‘the locals’ get a bit romanticized as well. This is why Scott is wrong in thinking his approach is Foucaultian — he imagines the vision of the state failing (or succeeding) to capture the rich organic texture of life ‘on the ground’ as if it were something which could be accurately discerned, while Foucault insists that the gaze is productive and elicits certain forms of subjectivies rather than identifying preexisting ones.)

If we followed Maia and Latour’s advice and attempted to understand the interaction of local/global forces symmetrically, we’d get a very different way of looking at these issues — one which is, for me anyway, more satisfying in the way that it takes the top off of black boxes with names like ‘The State’ or ‘Global Capital’. A Neoliberalism-Social Studies of Science mashup also has one more feature (if you move on it quickly enough!) — it’s disgustingly sexy and would doubtless help in the quest for tenure!

Large Questions in Their Entirety

John Emerson’s recent Idocentrism post about analytic philosophy reminds me of why I went into the social sciences in the first place (after flirting with the idea of being a philosophy major):

I think that at least some philosophers should reverse the priority that analytic philosophers give to rigor over comprehensiveness. Rather than reducing problems to a size which can be successfully handled with rigor and certainty, I think that philosophers should try as best possible to handle large questions in their entirety. And these should be actual, real questions in all their thickness, and not questions about formalized models or imaginary hypothetical questions.

I can’t really think of a better way of stating what I think the strength is of anthropology over, say, economics or certain strands of sociology. I’ve tried to say this before, but John’s phrase “large questions in their entirety” really appeals to me.

At the same time, even in anthropology careers are usually predicated on one’s ability to carve out a narrow part of the world or intellectual spectrum on which you can plant your intellectual flag. Only later on (it seems) are you allowed to branch out and write books on the “large questions.” While books on the large questions may be some of the best known anthropology work, I’m not sure it constitutes the vast bulk of what is produced. This is perhaps true of all disciplines. The people who tackle such large questions are often people with unusual career paths, and not infrequently function outside academic institutions altogether. This is also one reason I like blogging and the internet. I think it opens up a space in which academics can take on such large questions. Hopefully that will eventually feed back into the very structure of our academic institutions. CKelty’s recent post about “anthropology on demand” gives me some hope that this is happening.

Locating Latour

Now that I am officially ‘a professor’ and have graduate students to advise, one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is the difference between the literature that you think is important and insightful, and what the field as a whole considers important and insightful. Everyone has articles and inspirations which are uniquely their own and which no one else ‘gets’. Reading Maia’s great post on Reassembling the Social has made me rethink (again) my position on Latour, an author with whom I have a love-hate relationship. Independently of this and for rather obscure reasons, I have been reading around in the ‘social problems’ literature that bloomed in Sociology in, as far as I can tell, the mid-seventies and early eighties. As I was reading through it it struck me — here is Latour’s genealogy!

Perhaps this is obvious to Latourophiles, but in my experience it is quite difficult to decipher Latour’s intellectual origins. There are many reasons: Latour is fond of over-simplistic, potted histories of philosophy and sociology; he is removed from the usual institutional structures of the French system; his work is anglo-french in an unusual way; he draws on many sources; and finally, we often teach people as parts of genealogies that they might not consider themselves part of.

There are many ways to read Latour — a Deleuze knock-off, a student of Serres, the bridge between French philosophy of science and a ‘constructivist’ approach to social studies of science, a scion of ethnomethodology (or perhaps just Aaron Cicourel). And then I was looking at Cicourel’s webpage at UCSD, and then I see that Joseph Gusfield is in the sociology department there as well. And didn’t I read somewhere that Latour spent a year at San Diego at some point…?

So the next time you assign Pasteurization of France in class, why not try starting off with an apperitif of Gusfield’s The Culture of Public Problems: Drink-Driving and the Symbolic Order of Blumer’s “Social Problems of Public Problems” or Spector and Kitsuse’s “Social Problems: A Reformulation”?

Suomen Semiotica

Like kinship studies, semiotics can encompass vastly different sorts of analysis and description. Both veer between the logical and literary, sometimes in competing schools, sometimes across the corpus of the same writer, and sometimes in the very same text (e.g., The Elementary Structures of Kinship). Compare Barthes and Greimas. Anthropologists of kinship can get caught up in a severe (rigorous or obscure) formalism, although the sort of analysis that yielded insights from the imaginative working out of the permutations of structure(s) has been out of favor for a while — as we keep hearing. Analysis of kinship often relies on a special technical vocabulary that many anthropologists of my generation (educated in the 1990s) have not mastered (quick: what’s the difference between ‘descent’ and ‘filiation’?).

Likewise, semiotics can be tough-going for the uninitiated. Fortunately, philosophers at Helsinki University have put together a dictionary of one of the founding fathers of semiology, C. S. Peirce. Their handy site is copiously citationed and nicely put together. Readers thumbing through the pages of Fame of Gawa, for example, might find some of the entries convenient:

“As it is in itself, a sign is either of the nature of an appearance, when I call it a qualisign; or secondly, it is an individual object or event, when I call it a sinsign (the syllable sin being the first sillable [sic] of semel, simul, singular, etc); or thirdly, it is of the nature of a general type, when I call it a legisign.” (A Letter to Lady Welby, SS 32, 1904)

“… a Qualisign is any quality in so far as it is a sign. Since a quality is whatever it is positively in itself, a quality can only denote an object by virtue of some common ingredient or similarity; so that a Qualisign is necessarily an Icon. Further, since a quality is a mere logical possibility, it can only be interpreted as a sign of essence, that is, as a Rheme.” (‘A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic’, EP 2:294, 1903)

Traction and Feasibility

Although Anna Tsing’s book is called Friction I feel it should really have been called Traction. This is a much less sexier title but did, I thought, capture what that book was about — the fact that ‘global’ forces are always realized in particular situations and it is the nature of these particulars that let them exert influence in the world. Of course, the contact of ‘global’ forces in ‘local’ situations always has unanticipated consequences (that is to say, ‘friction’) it is also efficacious — that is, it gives them the contact that allows them to move, giving them traction and making the world tractable for them.

My dissertation was a little bit about this. I called it ‘Making The Ipili Feasible.’ In it I played around with the idea of ‘feasibility’ that my informants used in the course of their fieldwork. The difference between a body of ore and a functioning mine is ‘feasibility’ — a mine is feasible in a way that an ore body is not if the costs of getting the gold out of the ground is less than it costs to sell it. This cost is not just the result of ‘world gold prices’ or ‘operation costs’. While ‘building a mine’ involves the creation of a complex infrastructure, ‘constructing’ a mine, I argued, involved creating a complex social network of actors and institutions, contracts and payment schedules and agreements, of which the physical infrastructure of a mine is only an excresence.

‘The Ipili’ it seemed, had to be made ‘feasible’ in the same way that the mine was — the situation in my fieldsite was such that everyone agreed that there had to be an ethnic groups called ‘the Ipili’ to whom compensation could be paid for the land destroyed by mining. This group also had to have a certain form — for instance, it had to have a small number of legitimate representatives that could negotiate (and sign contracts) on its behalf, it had to ‘own land’ in certain way, and so forth. So my story was in some sense one of ethnogenesis — the creation of an ethnicity in a way that it didn’t exactly exist before, an old theme in the literature that goes back to, among other things, Morton Fried’s The Notion of Tribe. The flipside of this is that these requirements, along with some other more straight-forward military and political-economic factors, made the Ipili ‘feasible’ in another sense — they seized the opportunity given them and became efficacious political actors who squeezed every last cent that they could out of the mine and government.
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Junking the Nature/Culture Divide

That our possessions encode and elicit our identities as persons seems both a commonplace and a fancy observation. For example: notions of ‘taste’ and ‘style,’ in the U.S., Japan, or wherever, reflexively link up practices of adornment and comportment with expressions of self. I love reading fashion blogs for the way they analyze self-presentation through clothing, often with refined understandings of cultural history. Slate compiles several excellent ‘street style’ blogs, many of which are urban micro-ethnographies of what people are up to in places like London or Helsinki. This on-going satire and serious critique of celebrity fashion contains some of the sharpest writing and analysis I have read, whilst also being super funny. Where contemporary usages of ‘style’ seem to me to emphasize creativity and individual expression, ‘taste’ points to perduring differences of a structural sort, most obviously those of class. Could you call these categories a metapragmatics of dress?

Clothing is easy. Here’s another easy one: pharmaceuticals. It’s not that hard to find examples of cultural projects that re-create materially what we human beings are. Pharmaceutical projects and products redefine the horizons of possible human being. Docility in body, docility in mind: fascinating new work is uncovering means through which mood is medicalized and controlled in consequential ways. And the corporate appetite for research subjects demands careful tracking and attention even as we read today that in the U.S. a federal panel is recommending a relaxation of regulations concerning the use of prisoners in pharmaceutical testing.

Accounts of the intermediation of the material and the symbolic or the corporeal and the social can include the lighthearted (tracking the category of ‘formal shorts’ over time) or something a bit more serious (noting disparities in access to life-changing drugs whilst criticizing a medical model that would reduce people to their molecular components). Current critical attention to ‘biopolitics,’ to the social processes and effects of science, to emergent digital worlds, and the like is exploding. We’ve grown accustomed to the claim that ‘nature’ has been superceded as either a symbolic construct grounding human affairs or the ‘world’ in itself ‘before’ our activity on it. Again, these notions can be given robust philosophical genealogies, or they can be illustrated with the rather obvious. Global warming grabs the headlines, but it’s worth remembering that the entire biosphere was also transformed by the atomic testing programs of states like the U.S. over the course of the twentieth century.

After all, we all inhabit worlds that contain and evince the traces of human activity in the past. And I don’t just mean the accumulated junk in my apartment. A visitor to highland New Guinea might be chagrined to learn that the grasslands of its valleys are largely anthropogenic. But once you realize that those valleys also contain traces of the radioactive activity of states on the other side of the planet, scaled observation (my apartment, a valley in New Guinea, the whole atmosphere) is rendered almost irrelevant because nature/culture encompasses all of them. Even Peter Day’s Global Business program today reflects on how people are nothing if not creatures who remake themselves via ‘the tool’ — whether the tool is a grass fire to clear land for gardening or a personal fabrication device.

In the Flesh in the Museum

Representations of Indians in American Natural History Museums

Preface: The recent posts on Ota Benga and the popular museum reminded me of an essay I had wanted to post last year when Kerim posted about the Bavarian village in display in Africa. I had prepared it for posting last year, but for some reason never did. The essay deals with the display of living people, and particularly native North and South Americans, in ethnographic/educational contexts — not the sideshow, but the museum and the culture fair.

“There are Indians in the Museum of Natural History,” writes Danielle LaVaque-Manty (2000: 71) “And there aren‘t any other kinds of people.” The particular Museum of Natural History LaVaque-Manty is speaking of is the Ruthven Museum of Natural History at the University of Michigan, but she could easily be describing any number of natural history museums throughout the United States—the American Museum of Natural history in New York City, the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, the Peabody Museum at Harvard, the Phoebe Hearst Museum in Berkeley, the Field Museum in Chicago, and so on. Since their respective inceptions, mostly in the latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, the American natural history museum has played a privileged role in the presentation and representation of American Indians1 to an American public largely defined in ambiguous counterpoint to the savage mannequins held at bay behind the plate glass of the museum display. Whether cast as the noble Redman sadly disappearing before the onslaught of civilization or as the savage heathen to be forcibly converted or eliminated entirely, the removal or disappearance of American Indians was a necessary prerequisite to the occupation by white settlers of the American land. The museum became, oft times literally so, the last refuge of the “wild” Indian, at the same time that the possession of the Indian in the museum came to stand for exactly the possession of the land that made the “wild” Indian an anachronism, an echo of a time not before the settlers came, but of a time entirely removed from the history of America, a time when America was, indeed, an entirely different and new world.

This paper deals with the presentation of Indians in the American museum. Continue reading →

ph34r my assemblage!

It used to be that ‘assemblage’ was a perfectly useful term used by archaeologists. Now however, it seems poised to unseat ‘neoliberalism’ as the theoretical buzzword of choice for bleeding-edge theorists. Or at least so it seems to me.

First there was the edited volume “Global Assemblages”:http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=1405123583 by Ong and Collier. Then there are was “medieval assemblages”:http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8159.html and now there is “assemblage: the encyclopedia article”:http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/2-3/101?etoc. And these are just the (nonarchaeological) uses of this term that hit my inbox recently.

I have to admit I find the idea interesting although I’m not very confident about how it will be used. I will go out on a limb, however, and predict that in 2011 Duke University Press (or its functional equivalent) will publish three books with the word ‘assemblage’ in the title. Ladies and gentlemen: start your engines!

Anthro Classics Online: Geertz’s Notes on the Balinese Cockfight

Perhaps one of the most widely read anthropological essays, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” by Clifford Geertz is available online in standard HTML format, as well as a PDF file. The continued popularity of this piece is due in no small part to Geertz’s fluid prose, sharp observation, and self-depreciating humor. (Self-mockery seems to be an essential ingredient for making an anthropological classic.) But I think the real appeal of this article is the way the reader is drawn into the process of anthropological discovery.

The article starts with a heart-pounding chase. Cockfights are illegal and the sudden appearance of the police during one of the first fights Geertz and his wife witnessed sent everyone scurrying home:

On the established anthropological principle, When in Rome, my wife and I decided, only slightly less instantaneously than everyone else, that the thing to do was run too. We ran down the main village street, northward, away from where we were living, for we were on that side of the ring. About half-way down another fugitive ducked suddenly into a compound-his own, it turned out-and we, seeing nothing ahead of us but rice fields, open country, and a very high volcano, followed him. As the three of us came tumbling into the courtyard, his wife, who had apparently been through this sort of thing before, whipped out a table, a tablecloth, three chairs, and three cups of tea, and we all, without any explicit communication whatsoever, sat down, commenced to sip tea, and sought to compose ourselves.

This story serves two purposes: The first is to draw the audience into the society along with the anthropologist. Just as this event led to Geertz making the transition from “outsider” to “participant,” so too does it make the audience feel as if they are active participants in the drama. The other purpose is to establish the subjective authority of Geertz’s account. Geertz can tell us what this ritual “really means” because he was there. Not only was he there, but he was embraced by the members of the society who loved his clumsy ways.

Does Geertz’s effective prose lull us into a false sense of interpretive complacency?
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Anthro Classics Online: Shakespeare in the Bush

When I asked for suggestions for how this blog should move forward, one issue that was raised was the lack of discussion targeted at anthropological novices. For this reason I am starting a new series linking to classical works in anthropology which are available online. The idea is to both encourage newbies to read some classical anthropological texts as well as allow those with Ph.D.s in the discipline to debate the contemporary value of these works.

Today’s entry is Laura Bohannon’s essay “Shakespeare in the Bush.” First published in 1971, reading this essay in high school really turned me on to anthropology. It explores how difficult it is to translate Shakespeare’s Hamlet into the cultural idiom of the Tiv in West Africa (the Tiv are mostly located in Nigeria). While the article takes on a straw-man argument (the idea that there is something universal about Shakespeare’s plays overlooks just how hard it is for even American school kids to learn to appreciate Hamlet), it is a well written article which I believe holds up to the test of time. With Bohannon playing the fool, we follow along as she struggles to explain European notions of kinship, ghosts, and justice to her Tiv audience. It works so well because it is Bohannon who is the butt of the joke, not the Tiv (although the self-assurance of the Tiv elders that they know better than Shakespeare how this story should be told is part of the story’s charm). Despite its whimsical tone, I think we actually learn quite a bit about Tiv culture and society in this short article.

Reading this article again just now I was struck by the fact that her audience consists of respected elders. My guess is that she would have found the audience much more receptive to Shakespeare’s narrative if they had been lower status members of society, such as children. In other words, I don’t think it is simply a case of the Tiv failing to understand Hamlet. Rather, I suspect that these elders perceive Bohannon’s narrative as a threat and are eager to “correct” her in order to neutralize that threat, whereas children or other members of the society less threatened by narratives suggesting alternative social structures would have had considerably less trouble understanding Bohannon’s retelling of Hamlet. This suspicion comes out of my own understanding of ideology as what Zizek calls the “active refusal to know.” According to such an interpretation of Bohannon’s article, there is nothing specific about Tiv society which prevents them from understanding Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but her storytelling is frustrated by the “will to ignorance” of the elders. Sure, even Tiv children would have been confused by many aspects of the story, just as American children are, but I’m simply suggesting that they might not have rejected the very premise of the story in the way that the elders did. Of course, we would probably have learned much less from such an exchange.

Neoliberalism in Anthropology

Rex’s recent post on “neoliberalism” sparked some good discussion, but much of it was focused on trying to define the term rather than understanding the phenomenon. In a comment Rex tried to refocus the discussion:

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?

One way of examining the question is to use the excellent database provided by AnthroSource. While somewhat limited in scope, it should be able to reveal broad trends in the discipline. Accordingly, I searched for all articles (in the past 100 years) that used “neoliberalism” in the title. The total number of results was 25 articles, of which over half were published in the past three years! Eleven were published in just the past year and a half. I’d say that’s a trend! The oldest article dates to 1996. [NOTE: Some of these are book reviews, I didn’t see any reason to treat them separately. The full list is below the fold.]

In my own comments on Rex’s thread I suggested that one of the reasons for this trend might be a rethinking of “globalization” and “transnationalism” in which scholars are moving away from issues of consumption and trying to focus on the impact of the organizations responsible for global governance, such as the IMF and WTO.

Of particular importance is the so-called “Washington Consensus“, defined by Wikipedia as:

a set of policies promulgated by many neoliberal economists as a formula for promoting economic growth in many parts of Latin America and other parts of the world. The Washington Consensus policies propose to introduce various free market oriented economic reforms which are theoretically designed to make the target economy more like that of First World countries such as the United States.

The Washington Consensus is the target of sharp criticism by both individuals and groups, who claim that it is a way to funnel economic productivity from less developed Latin American countries to large multinational companies and their wealthy owners in advanced First World economies. As of 2005, several Latin American countries are led by socialist governments that openly oppose the Washington Consensus, and many more are ambivalent. Critics frequently cite the Argentine economic crisis of 1999-2002 as the case in point of why the Washington Consensus policies are flawed, as Argentina had previously implemented most of the Washington Consensus policies as directed.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that over half of the articles using the term have followed in the wake of the Argentina crisis and the rise of left-leaning governments in Latin America. Although some of them date from all the way back in the 1990s, over half of the list of AnthroSource articles are related to Latin America.
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