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- Convenors:
-
Knut Myhre
(University of Oslo)
Douglas Holmes (Binghamton University)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-E397
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel investigates ethnographically the contemporary welfare state with a particular focus on the processes and relationships they enable and entail, and the social contracts they afford and actualise.
Long Abstract:
The classic welfare state envisaged a society of full employment, where the relief of suffering and the wellbeing and productivity of its citizens were central concerns for government action and state administration. Its conception relied on the emergence of macroeconomics and the notion of progressive taxation, where the state was responsible for managing the economy as a whole, and the individual owed taxes to the collective for its achievements and their reliance on public goods. The welfare state thus involved a complex social contract, where work or labour served as the basis for membership and social belonging, and productive contributions were constitutive for the relationship between the individual and collective.
For at least four decades, this conception has been challenged by different policy developments. These developments range from workfare programmes and tax reforms to austerity policies and basic income grants, and extend to sovereign debt and its counterpart in sovereign wealth funds. In different ways, these policies and practices change the grounds and justifications for extraction and distribution, and thus redefine the social contract and its constitutive relationships.
For this panel, we call for ethnographic explorations of such policies and developments with a view to shed light on contemporary welfare states, and the processes and relationships they enable and entail, and the social contracts they afford and actualise. In particular, we welcome attempts to investigate empirically topics related to macroeconomics that transcend the common microeconomic perspectives of anthropology and thus investigate the movement of the concept of the welfare state.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
The South Korean welfare state highlights the imperial nature of the "Keynesian compromise" during the Cold War. Recent changes from state-based economic policies to financialization carries important continuities. Both "eras" contributed to the making of a world of competitive consumerism.
Paper long abstract:
Amid instability in the West, many anthropologists have found comfort in the mythic views of the welfare state. Amid the collective cries of the "crises of neoliberalism," social scientists tell heart-warming stories when Western Europe and the USA were committed to full employment, the well-being of its citizens, and social goods. In contrast to these conventional views, this paper examines the South Korean welfare state to depict the imperial nature of the "Keynesian compromise." I begin with a historical examination of Keynesian concepts of capital controls and macroeconomics, with a specific focus on ex-colonial countries. Keynes sought to retain colonial continuities to provide raw materials necessary for the economic growth that would follow full employment and effective demand. Central to the welfare state was the transformation of working-class politics into consumerist desires and commodity fetishism. Then I will connect these plays of imperial power to developmentalism in South Korea and the building of its unique form of welfare institutions. These ethnographic descriptions illustrate the continuities and changes represented by South Korean state's move from state-directed industrialization to the export of national capital and the proliferation of financialization. The contemporary forms of economic power continue the fetishism of developmentalism that was central to the rise of the welfare state following WWII. Global capitalism in both the Keynesian and neoliberal "eras" contributed to the making of a world Arif Dirlik calls a "horse race of development figures (i.e., GNPs and GDPs, etc.)" based on "competitive consumption."
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates how the Norwegian oil fund conducts a custodial finance that is constitutive of the contemporary social contact and that always already entails questions of ethics and politics.
Paper long abstract:
The Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) - better known as the 'oil fund' - is currently the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. In this paper, I investigate ethnographically the complex relationships that the operation, governance, and use of GPFG involve. In particular, I explore the ways in which GPFG closely connects monetary, fiscal, and labour policies, and how it subjects these to democratic governance and decision-making. I moreover investigate how these relationships entails that the fund conducts a 'custodial finance', where it has a duty of care to act with the Norwegian public in mind, and serves to meet a multitude of social commitments. On this basis, I investigate how GPFG is central to the relationship between the individual and the collective, and to the relationship between past, present, and future generations of Norwegians, and thus plays a constitutive role for the contemporary social contract. In addition, I propose that the fund poses a profoundly anthropological problem, as it renders continued social co-existence a matter of concern and an object of experimental intervention. Finally, the paper aims to shed light on how finance plays a central role for the everyday functioning of the contemporary welfare state, and how questions of ethics and politics are always already immanent to this mode of finance.
Paper short abstract:
'Our vision is a society where everybody wants to do their fair share' states the Swedish Tax Agency. Fairness in practice is difficult. This presentation addresses the fickle negotiation at the Agency between the type of taxable activities that can be controlled and those that can be communicated.
Paper long abstract:
Swedes have confidence in its revenue collecting authority-the Swedish Tax Agency. It has built up confidence among the Swedish citizens over many years applying insights from international research on tax compliance while carefully interpreting the tax law. This results in its very moral motto: 'Our vision is a society where everybody wants to do their fair share'. Yet words alone do not make taxpayers comply; manifold control systems enforces such strategy in practice.
To the background of strategies to make all citizens provide their fair share, Tax Agency managers negotiate between the type of taxable activities that can be controlled and those that can be communicated. Based on ethnographic fieldwork following a risk assessment project about cost deductions from start to finish, I provide insights into the broader workings of the Tax Agency; consideration how it interprets the law, how it understands society, how it performs taxation and the relationships it aims to create with taxpayers.
One input to the risk assessment project was a random audit control where certain cost deductions were audited in detail. The audit result was unexpected. Not only were certain deductions more prevalent than originally thought among certain taxpayers; the random audit control also raised questions about the interpretation of law in practice. Could such cost deductions even be controlled? Ever? Such insights are difficult to communicate, as they contradict not only the message that all taxpayers provide their fair share, but also that the Tax Agency can apply the law equitably and fairly
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the conceptualizations of the welfare state by far-right activists. Drawing on ethnographic research in peripheral Milan, it explores the ways in which far-right actors link the questions of labor with the ideas of human fulfillment, social belonging, and national autarchy.
Paper long abstract:
My paper discusses the conceptualizations of the welfare state by contemporary far-right activists. Focusing on a series of projects undertaken by two far-right movements in peripheral districts of Milan, Italy, it explores the different ways in which the movements' leaders appeal to the sensibilities of both prospective members/supporters and a wider population, the target of their "welfarism"/ "assistentialism" (assistenzialismo). It focuses on three main aspects: first, it analyzes the strategies the activists employ in order to link charity activism with community-building practices. Second, it discusses the ways in which research participants relate the questions of labor with the ideas of human fulfillment and social (national) belonging. Third, it discusses their views on the role of the state and the very meaning of politics, demonstrating ambiguities inscribed into those views. In so doing, the paper demonstrates a skillful appropriation of the discourses and categories traditionally associated with the political left, an appropriation that enables the far right to reach to a variety of social actors in quest of belonging and stability.
The paper uses the case study of Italy as a point of departure for an investigation of broader transnational far-right discourse, which advances the criticism of neoliberal economy with the support of the ideas of national autarchy inspired by interwar economic ideologues.
Paper short abstract:
The paper is based on a fieldwork in Bahia, Brazil, during the recent economic and political crisis. It focuses on the work of front-desk bureaucrats tasked with fiscalisation of the Bolsa Familia Programme. It argues that the programme is built on differential citizenship and premises of scarcity.
Paper long abstract:
Cash transfers have been hailed as one of the most important social policy interventions in the early 21st century. In Latin America in particular conditional cash transfers (CCTs) were praised as the endogenous and sustainable solution to the problem of social protection. Brazil, which under the Workers' Party governments (2003-2016) rolled out the largest CCT in the world, the Bolsa Familia Programme (PBF), has risen to global prominence. In the context of low non-energy commodity prices, economic downturn and crisis of political legitimacy, however, any unproblematic view of redistribution is quickly disappearing. The paper is based on a fieldwork in the interior of Bahia in 2016 and 2017 at the height of recession and corruption scandal that led to the impeachment on President Dilma Rousseff. It focuses on the work of front-desk bureaucrats, who have been tasked with increased fiscalisation of the PBF as its future was becoming uncertain. By analysing how people saw the programme and new demands from the federal government, it argues that this novel distribution regime has been underpinned by liberal notions of scarcity and austerity from the very beginning. And despite the excitement that the cash transfers have produced in the recent past, shares from extraction are not always seen as rightful and universalising. On the contrary, they might build on and reproduce existing labour market segmentation and differential citizenship.