Many anthropologists interpret neoliberalism as a radical break from and dangerous rupture in post-war societies that featured Keynesian economic policies and welfare provision. The allure of a mythic welfare state has boosted John Maynard Keynes’s popularity to many who embrace certain facets of socialism. Many critical social scientists have embraced Keynesianism in ways that overlook how the US used Keynesian policies to reengineer and redeploy state power. Keynes’s liberal synthesis inspired managers in the US Treasury Department to understand depression-era problems of unemployment and poverty in ways that were consonant with the expansion of corporate power. For understanding Keynesianism, as it actually existed during the Cold War, we must analyse how the US Treasury and State Departments used Keynesian principles to rebuild the social reproductive capacities necessary for capitalist accumulation both domestically and in Western Europe. I focus on how the architects of post-war capitalism used full employment policies, labour laws and welfare provision to renovate the nexus of political practices and institutional structures in ways that formed a benevolent and caring image of ‘the state’ and the myth of a class compromise. Through these reforms, governmental planners and administrators used the ‘state idea’ to reorganize capital accumulation as if the post-war economy would represent ordinary people’s best interests. In the process, these sophisticated practices of power became reified as the ‘welfare state’ and the ‘Keynesian compromise’ in ways that endow these institutions and policies with a character divorced from practices of power. The post-war state embodied a dialectic of repression and reform that combined criminalizing dissent with full employment policies and welfare provision. Taking these aspects of power into account, we can see post-war Keynesianism in ways that inspire a robust and far-reaching criticism of the contemporary predicament of economic uncertainty, political instability and environmental degradation.

Against the backdrop of a world in crisis that plays as the stage of the ontological turn and political ontology, and based on long-term research on Colombia’s Andean southwest indigenous politics, this article critically assesses political ontologýs claims to the powers of difference. Following Wolin, Mouffe, and Laval and Dardot, it presents a notion of the political that takes into account the passionate, educational and transformative aspects of indigenous political praxis and engagements with commonality. The analysis of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ontological multinaturalism, Mario Blaser’s critique of modernity and Reason, and Arturo Escobar’s ontological political practice points at three interconnected problems: the persistent appeal to binary thinking; the making of relativism anew; and the problem regarding the dialogue and knowledge exchange between the ethnographer and the ethnographic subject. Recapturing the political is a way to engage complex and entangled political histories and experiences of democratization in which indigenous peoples emerge as bearers of the political. The feminist concept of situated knowledges is presented as an alternative to deal with knowledge partiality, self-reflexivity, political solidarity, and collaboration.

Anthropologists have generally found it reasonable to understand the Industrial Revolution in Britain as a product of global historical processes including colonialism and the structure of world trade. The extent to which the industrialization of British textile production was contingent on global processes has been illuminated in detail by historians such as Joseph Inikori. Andre Gunder Frank proposed that we should reconceptualize technological development as a ‘world economic process, which took place in and because of the structure of the world economy’. Yet the theoretical implications of understanding industrial technological systems as global and unevenly distributed phenomena have, by and large, not contaminated mainstream conceptions of technologies as politically neutral and fundamentally innocent manifestations of enlightenment, detachable from the societal contexts in which they have emerged. Social theory nevertheless offers perspectives for a radical rethinking of this conventional ontology of modern technology. If the premises of actor–network theory, material culture studies, Marxism and poststructuralist critiques of power and inequalities are combined with the perspectives of ecological economics on global social metabolism, the fossil-fuelled textile factories of 19th-century Britain can be reinterpreted as social instruments for appropriating embodied human labour and natural space from elsewhere in the global system. A renewed ‘anthropology of technology’ might focus on the observation that technology is not simply a matter of putting nature to work, but a strategy of putting other sectors of global society to work. 1

How do contemporary subjects navigate, withstand and even contest the particular governmental assemblages that define regimes of power today? The article addresses this question by considering ‘refusal’, which has emerged as an increasingly potent empirico-theoretical anthropological concept by, in part, marking an explicit contrast with the longer-standing concept of ‘resistance’. Through analysis of resistance and refusal literatures, and with reference to fieldwork with Burmese grassroots activists and Rohingya civil society actors, the article delineates resistance and refusal as divergent but intertwined tools for engaging different aspects of any given apparatus of power. Where resistance describes opposition to direct domination (sovereign modes of power, following Foucault’s schema), refusal describes the disavowals, rejections and manoeuvrings with and away from diffuse and mediated forms of power (governmentality). To the extent that contemporary apparatuses of power typically constitute a hybrid assemblage of sovereign and governmental forces, subjects of population groups draw upon both resistance and refusal tactics in their navigations of these apparatuses, navigations that refigure the collective resisting/refusing subject. Resistance and refusal hence operate in a quasi-dialectical relation, meaning that through a play of recursivity between apparent converse strategies (direct confrontation versus evasion) groups come to fortify stronger positions from which they can persist. Resistance and refusal not only constitute the conditions of each other’s possibility, sharpening the particular interventions that each makes, but demonstrate the necessity of a politics of manoeuvre in which subjects—as individuals and part of collective groups—oscillate between direct confrontation and governmental navigation.

This article constructs a dialogue between Alain Badiou's philosophy of evental subjectivation and anthropology as an empirical social science. Elaborating on the few existing anthropological engagements with Badiou's theory by bringing in his more recent writing, it aims to familiarise anthropologists with some key dimensions of his approach and conceptual apparatus and to consider its use for anthropological theorisation of political struggle and process. Reflecting ethnographically on the (after)life of one happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina (the 2014 Winter Revolt) in light of another happening (the 1992–1995 war), I investigate the conditions under which happenings may or may not come to function—and be recognised—as events, as catalysts of change. Substantially departing from Badiou's normative-universalist approach, I nevertheless argue that a core dimension of his project—an effort to conceptualise subject formation processually in relation to events—can inspire interesting avenues for anthropological theorising. Particularly in addressing questions of perspective, intensity and duration, I contend that anthropologists are well-placed to trace modalities of what Badiou calls ‘fidelity' and its refusal.

This article examines theories about the labour process that have become widespread during the last 30 years, focusing particularly on how subjective control/resistance processes play out in the workplace. My objective is to contribute to theories that highlight how employers’ incorporating worker subjectivity into management technologies cannot be simply understood as increased domination in the workplace; these new approaches introduce new variations in the entangled production of workers’ resistance and compliance. To understand the range of worker responses I argue for a processual power imbricated approach to the construction of subjectivity within the production process in service industries. My contribution to this discussion draws on the main conclusions of my research about the labour experiences of supermarket workers in the city of Rosario, Argentina. I specifically examine subjective control and its connection to the mobilization of the customer’s evaluation of workers.

Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given coherence by ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how anthropological icons like hau, mana, and the shaman, are created, and suggest that there might be fragments encountered during fieldwork that do not, in themselves, necessarily add up to a coherent whole, but which are fit into stories of these kinds because of the pressure of narrativity within conventional notions of anthropological theory. To illustrate this argument, we draw in particular on Malinowski’s stories of the baloma, Trobriander spirits of the dead, reading his well-known fieldwork diaries alongside his published account, in order to show how life is always stitched across multiple registers of storytelling, some of which take the form of narrative and others that do not. Attending to the space between these modalities, or to their crossings, a different picture of theory begins to emerge, and which hews a bit closer to our ordinary experience of social life.

Divergent theories of tragedy in the anthropology of secularism have been articulated with reference to the work of Talal Asad, yet he himself disavows a tragic sensibility. In seeking to understand this disjuncture, I sketch out political and analytical consequences of invoking tragedy when approaching Muslims in Europe and colonial-era shifts in Islamic law. I then align Asad’s demurral of tragedy with Walter Benjamin’s differentiation between classical tragedy and baroque drama. Benjamin demonstrates how anthropology could register (without affirming) secularism’s promise of disenchantment. Rather than tragedy, whose catharsis remains available for conscription by secular power, Asad’s critical project is animated by a methodological antihistoricism.

This article proposes a non-recursive detour for the perspectival concept of ‘equivocation’ by applying it to an ongoing ecopolitical approximation. I will describe how a Brazilian climatologist and a Yanomami shaman translate their concerns about the Amazonian rainforest in order to reach each other’s audiences. Drawing on their public appearances and published texts, it will be argued that they mimetically rephrase their environmental thinking according to – what they assume to be – the conceptual imagination and the formats of communication of the Other. The shaman’s and the scientist’s connective gestures are thus taken as part of an exceptional form of public, ecopolitical dialogue, concerned with the future of the rainforest. Whereas the concept of ‘equivocation’ has proven useful to disclose the translational–ontological gap between the native’s and the ethnographer’s conceptual languages, this article aims at looking somewhere else than the recursive, ethnographic Self. In particular, the argument will pay attention to how equivocations and the so-called ‘ontological differences’ might be embodied by specific actors, in specific situations, inviting us to describe how these differences are de facto navigated and co-implicated by people other than anthropologists.

The past several decades of US intervention in Somalia produced violent destabilization, dysfunction, and uncertainty, creating refugee outflows and terrorist networks against which the US is currently tightening its security cordons. This paper argues that Somalia’s recent history as a stateless region offers a cautionary and tragic case study of the long-term damages that ensue when wealthy states that intervene in poorer states in the name of their own security instead cause insecurity and inequities that enable violence, and then in response to that violence enact further securitization to protect themselves against the consequences of that damage. But rather than focusing on the state as a site of securitization, I focus on those whose lives are made insecure by the retreat of their state government and the imposition in its place of security regimes that are not created by their own state government. Such security regimes overlap and compete, are instituted by different state and nonstate actors for different purposes, and by their incoherence and multiplicity raise questions about the definition, location, and relevance of the state in such regions. The paper explores the emergence of new, interlinked security regimes that are partially or wholly constituted through the logics of a new security empire designed to respond to US security concerns. By turning attention to the situations faced by those who live within the insecurities of stateless regions, the paper asks, what happens to the concept of securitization when the national-territorial state is not the entity that operates as a ‘state’ in the lives of people, even though their lives are overlain with multiple and overlapping regimes of securitization?