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- Convenors:
-
Gabriele Orlandi
(Ca' Foscari - University of Venice)
Panas Karampampas (Durham University)
Paula Escribano (University of Barcelona)
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- Chair:
-
Cris Shore
(Goldsmiths)
- Discussant:
-
Agata Hummel
(University of Warsaw)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/017
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel encourages an anthropological perspective on public policies, considering them as spaces of negotiation, inclusion, and hope, as well as social actants resulting in violence and exclusion. Moreover, by looking at the Mediterranean it allows a narrow and novel comparative perspective.
Long Abstract:
Social and cultural reactions to the current Covid19-related crisis have generally resulted in new legitimacy for public intervention, thus disavowing once again the narrative of a State roll-back due to neoliberal globalization. This panel calls for a renewed anthropological attention to the manifold ways in which public policies shape the lives of ordinary people, (re)producing subjectivities, dispositions, and regimes of meaning.
Considering the social normativity performed by policies, it is possible to stress, at the same time, that strategies and tactics enacted by people and actors carrying on their own agenda make such dispositifs unstable. This makes ethnography particularly well-suited for understanding how public policies work - while avoiding the unconscious reproduction of State's logic - and for exploring the social spaces that those policies produce and reshape.
We will look in particular at the countries of the Mediterranean: featuring an amalgam of political instability, quasi-welfare, as well as imposed austerity, these countries constitute an excellent case for reframing our comprehension of the State, as well as of supranational, regional and municipal institutions. Recent literature points out that people there show comparable attitudes towards institutional violence of which public policies are a significant component. Thus, whilst contributing to revisit the Mediterranean as a field of study through comparison of current "policy worlds" this panel welcomes proposals on 1) the perceptions of policies, both of bureaucrats and targeted subjects, as well as on 2) how policies shape livelihoods and are, in turn, reshaped by the latter.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the insight that unemployed people are in a particular condition of liminality, my ethnography suggests that the courses for active search of job are a sort of rites of passage and part of neoliberal ideological apparatuses aiming at transforming the subjectivities of the unemployed.
Paper long abstract:
Grounded on an ethnographic research among unemployed people in Turin, Italy, and, in particular, on a period of participant observation of one of the municipal centres offering courses for the active search of jobs, the paper aims to analyse some important dimensions of contemporary neoliberal policies concerning unemployment. Drawing on the insight that unemployed people are in a particular condition of liminality, my ethnography suggests that the courses for active search of job are both a particular kind of rites of passage and part of neoliberal ideological apparatuses. As such, they aim at transforming the subjectivities of the unemployed while supporting an individualized conception of the lack of work, strictly connected to the neoliberal ideology, according to which the unemployed is the main responsible of his or her predicament. My ethnographic research shows that the strength of the courses largely rests upon the hidden ritual and symbolic qualities of this dispositive. Indeed, as rites of passage, the courses offer a new fictive role to the participants, which are no longer represented only by the negative figure of the unemployed, but through the more positive one of the job-seeker. Moreover, the courses can be seen as having a “magical” dimension: like magical rites they offer a symbolic defence against the risk of the lack of presence. The ideological and ritual dimensions of the courses are quite clear, but we can ask: which actual effects do they have on unemployed’s subjectivities and livelihoods?
Paper short abstract:
This communication will present the impacts of a problematic encounter of public and professional norms in the pastoral world of Provence. It will describe the strategies adopted by shepherds to manage paradoxical injunctions in their work and how they have progressively internalized these norms.
Paper long abstract:
In this communication, Emilie Richard-Frève proposes to present the results of her research in anthropology, which question the impact of French and European agricultural public policies on the transformation of the agricultural world, and more particularly among transhumant sheep herders in south-eastern France. Immersed in this pastoral environment for more than 15 years, she was able to observe, as a salaried shepherdess, the evolution of a profession confronted with a growing standardization and bureaucratization of work. She observed how shepherds became increasingly dependent on subsidies, leading them to change their way of doing. However, this imposed change in practices and the mastery of these new administrative skills were not evident and shook up the representations and existing professional standards. Using examples, she will describe some strategies adopted by shepherds to manage these 'public norms' while trying to maintain a good position within their professional group. She will present the paradoxical injunctions experienced by these shepherds and the progressive internalization (voluntary or not) of the 'public norms' observed. She will describe the representations of the shepherds about 'public norms' and will analyse the evolution of this meeting of public and professional norms. She will conclude with questions about the apprehension of 'public norms' in social science research. In fact, what is a 'public norm' and how is it negotiated by citizens, individually or collectively? How do they confront existing social norms and relations of power? In short, how can we study these normative phenomena in social anthropology?
Paper short abstract:
Despite ecological and social benefits living as a herder and selling the products derived is increasingly hard in Catalonia. Through the presentation of three ethnographic case studies the paper argues that social normativity enforced by public policies is the main cause of its threat of extinction
Paper long abstract:
In Catalonia (Spain) living as a herder and selling the products derived from the herd is increasingly hard. From the public administration discourses, pastoralism is an activity that offers great benefits for the conservation of natural environments and benefits supply chains of quality products and of food proximity in rural areas. It is also part of the cultural and historical heritage of different rural areas. However, it is at risk of disappearing. The socio-cultural perception of herder as a way of life and the complicated institutional, bureaucratic and economic networks in which the occupation of herder is embedded, are the main causes of its threat of extinction. Based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2017 in Catalonia, the paper aims to present three case studies of young people who want to continue with the pastoralist way of life in Catalonia and delves into (1) the impact of public policies on their initiatives and the way herders perceive them, and (2) the perception of public authorities of their own policies and their effects.
Paper short abstract:
This paper mobilises historical and ethnographic data from the Western Alps to address local development as a modality of situated and desired transformation toward the future. In particular, it focuses on the discourse and vernacular frames that development policies contribute to reproduce.
Paper long abstract:
Local development is part of the horizon of hope of the Italian Alps today. Dating back to the second half of the 19th century, the crisis of mountain farming resulted in emigration, agricultural demise, and abandon. The idea that by improving public services and productive systems, depopulation will stop is a recurrent leitmotiv of the history of the Italian state. Misrepresentations of the actual conditions of mountain economy and of the logic of local peasantry eventually resulted in schemes not attempting the desired effects. Moreover, discourses and practices layered through decades has contributed to framing how people understand and enact public policies related to highland regions, and the kind of material and emotional future they desire.
The possibility of public intervention upon the economy of mountain peasants was however far from being self-evident at the inception of the Italian state. How it happened that mountain landscapes started to be regulated by public intervention? Which representations of peasantry made it possible? How, in intersecting with other social processes, development both shaped the social and economic environment of the Alpine space and discourses related to this latter? By mobilising historical and ethnographic data from a locality in Western Alps, this paper looks at development policies in the mountains as specifics patterns of knowledge, power and hope in order to address questions related to scales of social life, memory, and value. Moreover, it adopts a microanalytical perspective to explore how discourses on mountains and mountain peasantry are reproduced through these situated initiatives.