Social Anthropology 

About: Social Anthropology is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Kinship & Applied anthropology. It has an ISSN identifier of 0964-0282. Over the lifetime, 1230 publications have been published receiving 15183 citations. The journal is also known as: Anthropologie sociale.

Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism

Abstract: The anthropology of neoliberalism has become polarised between a hegemonic economic model anchored by variants of market rule and an insurgent approach fuelled by derivations of the Foucaultian notion of governmentality. Both conceptions obscure what is ‘neo’ about neoliberalism: the reengineering and redeployment of the state as the core agency that sets the rules and fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to realising markets. Drawing on two decades of field-based inquiries into the structure, experience and political treatment of urban marginality in advanced society, I propose a via media between these two approaches that construes neoliberalism as an articulation of state, market and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third. Bourdieu's concept of bureaucratic field offers a powerful tool for dissecting the revamping of the state as stratification and classification machine driving the neoliberal revolution from above and serves to put forth three theses: (1) neoliberalism is not an economic regime but a political project of state-crafting that puts disciplinary ‘workfare’, neutralising ‘prisonfare’ and the trope of individual responsibility at the service of commodification; (2) neoliberalism entails a rightward tilting of the space of bureaucratic agencies that define and distribute public goods and spawns a Centaur-state that practises liberalism at the top of the class structure and punitive paternalism at the bottom; (3) the growth and glorification of the penal wing of the state is an integral component of the neoliberal Leviathan, such that the police, courts and prison need to be brought into the political anthropology of neoliberal rule.

Global pathways. Working class cosmopolitans and the creation of transnational ethnic worlds

Abstract: The current interest in new diasporas and globalisation processes raises the question of what a transnational subjectivity might be like? What does it mean to be, in some sense or other, at home in the world? The present article responds to debates on cosmopolitans and transnationals, hybridity and globalisation through a consideration of the transnational world created by south Asian migrants. It argues that labour migration forges global pathways, routes along which people, goods, places and ideas travel. The need is, the article argues, to recognise the class dimensions of this movement and the significance of both strong and weak ties in determining emergent forms of cultural transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. The ethnic and religious worlds discussed in the paper – of Pakistani Muslim religious sufis and working class Pakistani ‘cosmopolitans’ – cut across national boundaries and are centred beyond Europe. The global highways along which Pakistani labour migrants travel also carry goods, brides and tourists. Like the Melanesians of whom Strathern writes that they make places and sentiments ‘travel’, Pakistani migration involves the metonymic movement of ceremonial objects such as food, clothing, cosmetics and jewellery which personify moral ‘places’. And it is through these that new global ethnic social worlds are constituted. Global families and trans-national marriages reconfigure the local through global connections, while still being marked by economic class and status.

Law and disorder in the postcolony

Abstract: Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than are other nation-states? In this paper, Jean and John Comaroff argue that the question is misplaced: the predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empire, new species of wealth; an order that criminalises poverty and race, and entraps the ‘south’ in relations of corruption. But there is another side to all this. Postcolonies may display endemic disorder, but they also often fetishise the law, its ways and means. In probing the coincidence of disorder and legality, this essay suggests that postcolonies foreshadow a global future under construction.

Beyond the multiversity: neoliberalism and the rise of the schizophrenic university

Abstract: The restructuring of New Zealand's universities is often considered a paradigmatic case of neo-liberal reform and governance. While tertiary education is increasingly central to government's ideas about the future global knowledge economy, a new set of discourses has emerged around universities and their role that draws together different, often contradictory, agendas. This heralds not the death of the liberal idea of the university but a shift towards a new, multi-layered conception in which universities are expected to fulfil a plethora of different functions. This article examines the implications of this emerging ‘schizophrenic university’ paradigm and its effects on academic subjectivities.

Governing by numbers: audit culture, rankings and the new world order

Abstract: Quantification and statistics have long served as instruments of governance and state power. However, in recent decades new systems of measurement and rankings have emerged that operate both beyond and below the nation‐state. Using contemporary examples, we explore how international measurements, rankings, risk management and audit are creating new forms of global governmentality. We ask, who – or what – is driving the spread of audit technologies and why have indicators and rankings become a populist project? How should we theorise the rise of measuring, ranking and auditing and their political effects? What are the impacts of these ever‐more pervasive systems on organisational behaviour and professional life?