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- Convenors:
-
Patrick Neveling
(Bournemouth University)
George Baca (Dong-A University )
- Discussant:
-
Claudio Lomnitz
(Columbia University)
- Location:
- Convention Hall A
- Start time:
- 15 May, 2014 at
Time zone: Asia/Tokyo
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
For this panel we invite papers that put theories of globalisation and neoliberalism to the test.
Long Abstract:
Capitalism, as its foremost critics have pointed out, is a revolutionary force par excellence. Capital represents powerful social and economic relationships that constantly transform and restructure the built environment as much as relations of production. Despite this obvious insight, contemporary anthropology has been seduced by such tropes as 'globalization' and 'neoliberalism'. Most social scientists and anthropologists invoke these categories in the name of history, taking them to define an entirely new stage of capitalism. An increasing number of scholars in anthropology and history point out, however, that these concepts foster a sense of "novelty" that is premised upon dominant narratives of state power and capital that were created during the "age of development" and "Keynesianism."
For this panel we invite papers that put theories of globalisation and neoliberalism to test. In what instances are 'globalisation' and 'neoliberalism' legitimate historical/analytical categories that reflect changes in the global system? In what instances are they legends or mythologies? What can anthropological analysis contribute to revealing the mythical dimension of 'globalisation' and 'neoliberalism' as cultural categories? What can anthropology say about the ways in which these periodizations lack analytical rigor and thereby dramatize the contemporary as if it is a frightening break with the past?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Building on several schools of thought in political economy and materialist anthropology, I argue that dynamics of globalisation are better understood as part of the long durée of crisis and change in global capitalism. Research on transnational Chinese migration will illustrate these arguments.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I will argue that dynamics of globalisation represent part of the long durée of crisis, change and instability that has accompanied the development of capitalism on a global scale. By drawing on the conceptual apparatus offered by several schools of thought in political economy and materialist anthropology, I attempt to trace the continuities that belie the notion of globalisation as rupture or as a radical break in attempts to periodize histories of global transformation. In doing so, I will argue that the insights offered in such analytical perspectives as the regulation school, historical realism, neo-Gramscian as well as materialist feminism are salutary in suggesting how the internationalisation and transnationalization of capitalist development engenders the cyclical yet variegated conditions of crisis and change across time and place. Such historical variegations, I shall argue, tend not only to be reified as unprecedented but also rendered as apocalyptic, so much so that regulatory powers invoke states of exception to instate and reinstate mechanisms of stabilisation as their prerogative in national and global governance. The exigencies that result from such interventions, in turn, add impetus to prevailing crises that cycle in the global economy of capitalism and insert themselves in the lives of those who must live and work within it. Illustrations will be drawn from research on transnational Chinese migration and the emergence of migrant service workers in France.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the conditional cash transfer in the Philippines as a poverty alleviation program, this paper will discuss what are the dilemmas and unintended consequences of the regime of neoliberal social policy which relies on the mobilization of community, family, and citizenry.
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on conditional cash transfer in the Philippines as a poverty alleviation program, this paper will discuss the dilemmas and unintended consequences of the regime of neoliberal social policy. There is a widely shared understanding among anthropologists that "the social" has undergone a fundamental reconfiguration. This literature asserts that government agencies have increasingly relied on the mobilization of autonomous citizens and active communities rather than through the totalizing space of "the social". Such government policies emphasize nurturing the ethical citizenship and moral community in ways that citizens internalize the norms and values such as "investment in human capital", "self-help", "voluntarism", "entrepreneurship", "responsibility", "productivity", and "empowerment". However, these discussions are mostly based on the experience of the western welfare state and its transformation since the late 1970s. The focus of this paper is on a conspicuous mixture of neoliberal rationality with social development policy in a country that has never experienced a strong welfare state regime - a situation characterized by a weak state, entrenched social divide, patronage politics, and huge informal sector. What are the dilemmas, contradictions, and unexpected outcomes of the social development policy in countries that mobilize neoliberal rationality for the justification of social spending and redistribution? What is unique in the experiences of these countries which cannot simply be reduced to the neoliberal governmentality of the western post-welfare states? In order to answer these questions, the paper presents a case study of the conditional cash transfer program in urban poor communities in metro Manila.
Paper short abstract:
The aim of the paper is to analyze adjustments to neoliberal social change in a Slovak village, in order to test the theories of neoliberalism. The author focuses on the feature of the neoliberal system that encourages awareness of self-governance in the local community.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes adjustments to neoliberal social changes of village life in a post-socialist European country. These countries have struggled with building a democratic and capitalistic society influenced by neoliberalism as a process of becoming members of the European Union. Usually individual exploitation is regarded as a remarkable effect of neoliberalism. However, neoliberalism has also influenced Eastern Europeans to awaken to the concept of self-governance and self-responsibility. This insight is important for anthropologists to test the theories of neoliberalism as a new stage of capitalism. Many inhabitants of Slovak villages have accepted two kinds of neoliberal system change: the emergence of workers in the private sector accelerating the shift of priority from the local community to individual interests and the decentralization of local politics. Many local governments soon began to suffer from lack of financial resources and the skills for the management of the economic problems of villages. Members of local governments work almost on a volunteer basis and it is difficult to find skilled people for these bodies. Worse yet, local volunteer associations not only face problems finding their own sources of funding from the local government, but also lack skills for searching for information about additional financial aid from foundations to support their activities. In this case, people endure a "democratic" society combined with neoliberal policy; it brings them a new perspective in their own community as a kind of democracy in this global world.
Paper short abstract:
This paper criticizes theories of globalization. I will focus on the way the Korean state used the idea of globalization to create a sense of crisis during the 1990s in order to transform the state following the upheavals of the democracy movement.
Paper long abstract:
The twin concepts of neoliberalism and globalization have mesmerized anthropologists. With the help of these concepts, many scholars have discovered a new confidence to walk out from under the hesitancy of postmodernism and wade confidently into the tumultuous waters of contemporary capitalism. With a sense of novelty they proclaims a "new' world of rupture and crisis signaled by the demise of the welfare states. Unfortunately these concepts resonate with the narratives the Korean state produced during the 1990s. Korean state agencies and its allies in business used ideas of globalization to create a sense of crisis -- an imperative that demanded action -- and reorganized society-state relations accordingly. This paper will describe and analyze the way powerful classes in Korea used this sense of crisis to radically transform state structures of dictatorship into a democracy based on liberalization of markets. With the victories of the democracy movement, the large industrial firms known as chaebol -- often credited with the economic miracle -- had become targets of popular anger. The chaebol classes became viewed as villains in an unfolding story of Korean democracy. Indeed the chaebol not only opposed the democracy movement but it feared its own, and therefore the nation's, survival. State agents and Korean capital fashioned a sense crisis, inherent in a new age defined by globalization, whereby it forged a new nationalist narrative and forged new alliances with the middle-classes and small businesses that bristled under the dictatorship.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that "neoliberalism" and "globalization" (after Appadurai) have become mystifying tropes in anthropologies of migration. Their analytical relevance will be tested in the case of Philippine migration with reference to Marx's insights about the volatility of capital and labor.
Paper long abstract:
Hundreds of millions of migrants worldwide live and work under precarious conditions, often without recourse to employment standards, and social and political rights afforded non-migrant co-workers. Some observers note that the conditions confronted by many migrants are not unlike those experienced by migrant workers in previous centuries. Yet others, proponents of the present as the "age of migration", argue for the uniqueness of contemporary migration in its global sweep and neoliberal causation. This paper commences from the proposition that both "neoliberalism" and "globalization" (after Appadurai) have become tropes in the anthropological migration literature, working as mystifying 'place fillers'. As such, they substitute for a rigorous accounting of historical political economy and its contributions to contemporary migration policies, practices, and politics. The analytical relevance of these constructs will here be tested with reference to Philippine migration. Theoretically the paper engages with Marx's insights that to endure, capitalism requires ever greater efficiencies for the extraction of wealth. Localized economic upheavals provide a vehicle for capital accumulation by multiple means, including displacement and sometimes dispossession of various populations. While it has become fashionable to attribute such disruptions of livelihoods and ways of living to neoliberalism, two decades ago globalization served the same purpose; to what effect?
Paper short abstract:
In order to situate the 1984 poisoning of the population of Bhopal, India, by Union Carbide Corporation (now merged with Dow Chemical) within an understanding of the history of capitalist transformation, this paper interrogates the usefulness of terms like 'globalisation' or 'neoliberalism'.
Paper long abstract:
Poisonous gases leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the city of Bhopal in India one night in December 1984, killing thousands immediately and leaving an estimated one hundred thousand people permanently disabled. The prolonged aftermath is frequently characterised as a second disaster -- a delayed and corrupt court settlement has brought grossly inadequate compensation to a small fraction of the survivors through a slow and tortuous claims process; Union Carbide Corporation has successfully managed to evade liability through corporate shape-shifting after being bought out by Dow Chemical Company; adverse health effects and birth defects due to gas exposure continue to proliferate in Bhopal; dangerous contaminants still seep into the air, water and soil from the abandoned and festering Union Carbide factory.
The transnational corporation is an emblematic institutional form of present-day capitalism. There are important systemic processes that have been opened up for view in the morphing of the Union Carbide Corporation into the Dow Chemical Company, and the consequent disavowal of responsibility for Bhopal by both entities. As Bhopal survivors have suffered from and struggled against the injustices heaped on them, the historical trajectory of the capitalist world order has seemingly tilted against them. This paper seeks to place the experience of Bhopal survivors within the intersecting force fields of local and global transformations of capital, and asks if neologisms such as globalisation or neoliberalism extend our understanding of this experience.
Paper short abstract:
This paper assesses the bad timing of periodisations of world history in anthropology. Alternatively, I outline the changes in the capitalist world-system in the twentieth century with the global spread of export processing zones and special economic zones since the 1940s as my main example.
Paper long abstract:
I argue that mainstream assessments of the rise of neoliberalism are highly problematic for two reasons. First, neoliberalism did not appear as a watershed in the world-system after the 1970s global crisis, as many macro-approaches would have it. Instead, if we can speak of a neoliberal model at all, this emerged in the 1930s and became powerful via US policies towards the Global South. Since the US-Truman administration's Point Four program of the late 1940s policies were about maintaining, and not establishing, deregulated labour relations and "off-hands" postcolonial policies towards multinational corporations. Notions of a global emergence of neoliberalism are then, at best, Western-centric orientalisms. Second, the global spread of export processing zones (EPZs) and special economic zones (SEZs) is often propagated as one of the defining features of a global shift in the 1970s. This is often associated with a rise of Newly Industrialised Countries (NIC) in East and Southeast Asia. A concise enquiry of the spread of such zones on a global scale and in particular national settings reveals two very different periodisations, however. The world's first EPZ was set up in Puerto Rico in 1947. Similar policies spread rapidly in the 1950s. If we consider the impact of these policies on the ground, it is evident that the shift from Fordism to neoliberalism that is so central to macro-models in anthropology, never actually happened. What is called neoliberal was instead a slight revision of existing colonial policies in many nations of the Global South.
Paper short abstract:
Chinese socialism is at critical crossroad. The State has deepened privatization and market policies in ways that undermine the hallmarks of socialism. I examine these contradictions based on the Wenchuan earthquake relief project to show how Chinese struggle for values of equity, justice and social cooperation.
Paper long abstract:
Chinese socialism is at critical crossroad. The State has deepened privatization and market policies in ways that undermine the hallmarks of socialism. I will examine these contradictions based on the Wenchuan earthquake relief project. This project presented an image of Chinese society as collectively united to selflessly assist the earthquake-stricken area. Resources, money, and medical supplies flooded into the disaster areas. The cause seemed to be supported by everyone from high-ranking officials, movie stars, “nobles,” and ordinary citizens. “One in trouble, all to help,” a common phrase during the revolutionary days of Mao suddenly came into vogue again. The media attacked a well-known real estate company for insufficiently contributing to the national cause.
A comparison of this with the public reaction to the 1998 Yangtze River big flood indicates that reforms in recent decades have led to a conception of social responsibility. Rather than thinking that the government should promote this operation, Chinese citizens came to think it was their personal responsibility. Interestingly, the Wenchuan earthquake provided an opportunity to express a public desire for equity, justice and social cooperation. These concepts, rooted in Chinese communist ideology, are seen by many as the ideal of Chinese socialism. Although this ideal had been very absolute, a famous saying that “we would rather prefer grass in socialism than vegetable in capitalism” fully embodied the egalitarianism of the Mao Zedong era. Chinese struggle for policies that represent the values of equity, justice and social cooperation, which remains the key question of Chinese socialism.