Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2004. New York. Penguin Books. 448 pages. ISBN: 0143035592 (paper).

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

As far back as we know, there have been individuals inca-pacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder". Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomemon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions, a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilising these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in a psychiatric unit specialising in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the tran-scripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.@@@Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory.

In 1998-1999, Prahalad and colleagues introduced the Base/Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) concept in an article and a working paper. This article’s goal is to answer the question: What has become of the concept over the decade following its first systematic exposition in 1999? To answer this question, the authors conducted a systematic review of articles on the BOP, identifying 104 articles published in journals or proceedings over a ten-year period (2000-2009). This count excludes books, chapters, and teaching cases. The review shows that the BOP concept evolved dramatically following Prahalad’s original call to multinational enterprises (MNEs). De-emphasizing the role of MNEs over time, published BOP articles portray a more complex picture, with wide variations in terms of BOP contexts, of BOP initiatives, and of impacts of the BOP approach. A simple framework for organizing the reviewed articles helps discuss findings, identify the gaps that still exist in the literature, and suggest directions for future research.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2195659_code105013.pdf?abstractid=2193938&mirid=5&type=2

Reviewing a Decade of Research on the 'Base/Bottom of the Pyramid' (BOP) Concept

The economic enclaves that are being built across South India would appear to exemplify what Aihwa Ong has called ‘neoliberalism as exception’. Drawing on fieldwork in and around one ‘special econo...

/pdf/neoliberalism-as-unexceptional-economic-zones-and-the-gkf7k4cbwq.pdf

Neoliberalism as Unexceptional: Economic Zones and the Everyday Precariousness of Working Life in South India

One neglected socio-cultural and political dimension to the rapid diffusion of solar power in Sub-Saharan Africa is the question of what happens when things fall apart. Investors in the small-scale renewable energy sector are increasingly concerned with the status of broken or non-functioning products and there is an emerging consensus around the need for centralised recycling systems as the solution to future flows of ‘solar waste’. But what does the afterlife of off-grid solar products look like from below? Grounded in anthropology, geography and economic sociology, this paper tracks the impact of off grid solar products through contexts of breakdown, repair, and disposal. Combining stakeholder interviews, a longitudinal survey of product failure rates in Kenya and ethnographic research at a repair workshop in the town of Bomet, we challenge narratives of energy transitions that fail to address the environmental consequences of mass consumption and present an alternative approach to solar waste embedded in cultures and economies of repair.

https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/files/59647620/1_s2.0_S2214629618304055_main.pdf

The afterlives of solar power: Waste and repair off the grid in Kenya

This article explores what anthropology has to say about contemporary business strategies for market expansion among poor consumers in Africa and Asia. Focusing on the activities of global consumer goods company Unilever in India, we show how anthropology can provide valuable insights into the hidden work and power relations involved in transforming an everyday commodity like soap into a composite object, what we call a ‘social good’, that is capable of simultaneously combating disease, tackling poverty and realizing value for shareholders.

Anthropology at the bottom of the pyramid

Acknowledgements Note on Language Glossary and Abbreviations List of Maps and Illustrations 1: The Economy of Anticipation 2: The Vision of Growth 3: The Land of Speculation 4: The Factory of the Future 5: The Labour of Aspiration 6: The Struggles for Tomorrow 7: Anticipation, Capitalism, Anthropology Endnotes Bibliography Index

Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India

At the end of 2010, the British Museum unveiled the final artefact in their exhibition ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’: a portable solar-powered lamp designed for and sold to people living without access to mains electricity in Africa and Asia. Solar-powered lights have become iconic objects of social entrepreneurship in Africa and Asia and this article explores the work involved in producing them as humanitarian goods. Following the 100th object from its conception in a Stanford University classroom to points of sale and use in rural India, the article explores how it has been made to materialise both an ethic of care and an ethic of commercial interest. Drawing from traditions in the social study of technology and the conceptual vocabulary of Michel Callon, the author argues that the significance of objects like the ultra-affordable solar lamp lies in their capacity to make and define markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’.

Jamie Cross

Papers

Neoliberalism as Unexceptional: Economic Zones and the Everyday Precariousness of Working Life in South India

The afterlives of solar power: Waste and repair off the grid in Kenya

Anthropology at the bottom of the pyramid

Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India

The 100th Object: Solar Lighting Technology and Humanitarian Goods