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- Convenors:
-
Raul Acosta Garcia
(Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Insa Koch (University of Sankt Gallenis)
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- Discussant:
-
Cris Shore
(Goldsmiths)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The translation of moral projects into technically implementable terms has become a recurrent strategy for policymaking. We seek cases around the world to identify common features, attempt further theorizations, and reflect on our discipline's potential contribution to better understand this trend.
Long Abstract:
Around the world, public issues are increasingly dealt with through technomoral means (Bernstein and Sharma 2016). That is, political tactics prioritize moral projects and then translate these into technically implementable terms through policies or laws. These processes challenge the neoliberal mantra of 'evidence-based policies' as an assurance of neutrality. From political entrepreneurs to non-governmental organisations and activists to bureaucratic measures and new legislation, different actors and processes have promoted value-laden interventions.
Of course, anthropologists have long disputed claims of objectivity in policy making. If policies have always been political "under the cloak of neutrality" (Shore and Wright 2005), then what makes the current trend different is its explicit endorsement of a moral agenda. This, in turn, adds new layers of complexity to Foucault's dictum of power and knowledge as forms of control. While ideologies have always shaped much of our understanding of political arenas, technomoralities replace the old dichotomy of left/right with one of right/wrong.
We invite submissions that discuss examples of technomoral governance around the world, and how anthropologists can better understand the negotiations between knowledge, values, and public good involved. We will guide our discussions, but not limit them, to the following questions: how far are technical implementable terms stretched to fit moral projects? To what extent does techno-morality invite a displacement of a politics of redistribution and equality? And how does techno-morality sit with the 'post-truth- turn, including the rise of populism and a rejection of exert knowledge?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Ana Ivasiuc
Paper short abstract:
Campi nomadi-encampments housing Roma in Italy-are the result of policy-making in the 60s. A palimpsestic reading of the transformations of moralities surrounding campi nomadi uncovers the broader moral shifts in the governance of racialized otherness and poverty over the last fifty years.
Paper long abstract:
Roma Rights activists have coined Italy 'Campland' for its controversial policy of housing a share of their Roma population in the so-called campi nomadi - more often than not squalid, overcrowded encampments with precarious and faulty infrastructure, far removed from residential neighbourhoods but close to industrial or polluted areas. While the political consensus in Italy is that the camps should be dismantled, the advocates of this measure ground their arguments in diverging moral projects: on the right side of the political spectrum, the camps are a physical nuisance and their inhabitants morally undeserving outsiders who should be cast out of Italian society; on the left, the camps are undignified places of segregation that sustain exclusion rather than inclusion. But the policy of campi nomadi originated in yet another moral frame: the multicultural project starting in the sixties in Europe. The camps were the result of apparently well-intended lobbyists who, following recommendations from the Council of Europe, advocated for the camps as a measure to protect nomadism as valuable cultural trait of the Roma. Following these transformations in a recent-historical perspective, the paper takes campi nomadi as a technomoral dispositif that uncovers the broader moral shifts informing Italian policies. The palimpsestic reading of moralities surrounding the camps reconstitutes the transformation of policies from social inclusion to the contemporary governance of racialized otherness and poverty in securitarian neoliberalism.
Claudia Fonseca (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul)
Paper short abstract:
Examining the moral and political underpinnings of the infrastructural devices used to manage and promote legal child adoption in Brazil, we highlight mechanisms of "strategic ignorance" that allow state authority to remain intact despite the widespread existence of non-orthodox practices.
Paper long abstract:
Tacking back and forth between courthouse bureaucracy, media campaigns, and ethnographic observations in working-class neighborhoods, I examine in this paper public policies of child adoption in Brazil. Starting from various media campaigns for the adoption of "difficult-to-place" children, I argue that these public rituals of beneficent state intervention, although appealing to journalistic spotlights, cannot be adequately understood without considering a series of non-orthodox paths to adoptive parenthood that remain persistently in the shadows. Building on the now traditional debates concerning the state and its margins, I place particular emphasis on how infrastructural technologies used to mediate child adoptions are adjusted to maintain a tense equilibrium. Not only does the bureaucratic insistence on forms, lists and statistics help transmute political options into moral certainties. As mechanisms of "strategic ignorance" that highlight certain behaviors while imposing complete silence on others, these technologies effectively create a zone of legal ambiguity that allows state authority to remain apparently intact despite the existence of widespread practices well outside the norms of official courthouse procedure.
Tim van de Meerendonk (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I show how crop insurance is saturated with techno-moral narratives of vulnerable farmers in need of protection through the machinery of financial technology, while this same language is used by farmers to mobilise resistance to the injustices which they experience.
Paper long abstract:
The moral unease which India has with rural suffering has dominated political debate and agricultural policy for years. This 'agricultural crisis' has provided the imperative for technocratic interventions designed to alleviate rural distress. This paper addresses the techno-moral consequences of one such intervention at the every-day level; an insurance scheme which aims to protect farmers against crop loss. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the drought-prone region Marathwada, I argue that techno-moral interactions between farmers and insurance companies do not stop at the 'languages of law and policy' (Bornstein and Sharma 2016, 76) and show how they extend into the idiom of facts and numbers.
To this effect, I describe the actions of a farmer's organisation who has been embroiled in a struggle against an insurance company which they accuse of misrepresenting damages which farmers suffered in 2017. Through India's transparency laws they have gained access to damage reports which the insurance company conducted, whose validity they have subsequently come to question. I suggest that the de-legitimation of these damage reports operates in two interconnected ways. Firstly, farmers use the moral language of rural suffering and uncaring to posit that insurance is an inadequate solution to the problem. Secondly, they substantiate these claims by employing the language of law and number to articulate a refutation of technical knowledge on its own terms. By explicitly questioning the legal terminology, data gathering practices and mathematical formulae, farmers enunciate a value-laden language of resistance against the techno-moral governance crop insurance represents.
Insa Koch (University of Sankt Gallenis)
Paper short abstract:
Efforts to relieve moral suffering have become a central tenet of policy making. The British government's modern slavery agenda in relation to county lines illuminates how states shore up popular consent beyond a politics of law and order when their democratic mandates have come under attack.
Paper long abstract:
States' efforts to relieve moral suffering have become a central tenet of domestic policy making. The British government's modern slavery agenda in relation to county lines provides a case in point. County lines is the name given by the police to networks of Class A drugs spreading from the cities to coastal and market towns that rely on young runners as foot soldiers. These foot soldiers - predominantly working class and ethnic minority young men who would normally be criminalised for their involvement in the illicit economy - are now being discovered as modern slaves in need of saving. Yet, images of victims' suffering also justify techno-moral control, as professionals invoke technocratic expertise to separate those worthy of saving from others who are the object of rightful punishment. The fraught politics of victimhood at the heart of the modern slavery agenda foregrounds the role of moral registers in governing disenfranchised populations in austerity Britain. It illuminates how states shore up popular consent beyond a politics of 'law and order' at a time when their democratic mandates have come under attack.
Raul Acosta Garcia (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Paper short abstract:
The promotion of bicycling in Mexico City has in recent years moved up in public policy agendas. This paper examines the way in which decisions on changes in infrastructures and norms appear to be guided by technomoral doctrines, shaped sometimes with and others at odds with activists and advocates
Paper long abstract:
The toll of decades among the world's megalopolis combines a wide array of strains for Mexico City's urban dwellers. Pollution, congested avenues, high levels of noise, insecurity, and other aspects affect the everyday life of its inhabitants. In this context, activists have for a couple of decades promoted bicycling as a form of transport by insisting on potential benefits to people, environment, and sociality. With the help from international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), development aid agencies, and financial institutions, local activists have tapped into an increasing awareness of environmental problems. In doing so, they have framed the promotion of bicycling as a case of urban ecological governance, which entails an understanding of how people, non-human life-forms, objects, and the built environment interact in the city. With this in mind, the bicycle has been promoted as an object with which urban dwellers can improve the city's environment, their own health, personal and local economies, social interactions among strangers, as well as the social atmosphere. Activists seek to convince individuals to take up cycling and government officials to consider it a matter for city-wide thinking, linking private and urban scales. This process has led to a series of technomoral doctrines, which emerge out of agreements or confrontations between activists, advocates, and government officials. These doctrines in turn are used to justify or inform decisions by the local city government for changes in infrastructures and norms. This paper offers an analysis of the performative and discursive negotiations at the heart of these developments.
Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Cologne)
Paper short abstract:
Turning to policies for apportioning green credits in China, this paper reveals how political accountability and environmental responsibility become recalibrated in moral terms and redistributed among citizens and corporations for the digital age.
Paper long abstract:
To overcome a prolonged perception of 'moral crisis' following China's integration into global capitalism, the communist party has promised to re-establish morality, credibility, and trust based on a new 'socialist value system.' Chinese policies that quantify and influence citizen and corporate behavior aim to safeguard accountability and transparency in the digital age, most notoriously through the emerging 'social credit system.' If Foucauldian 'biopower' was built on the rise of statistics, these experiments rely on a new form of 'infopower' (Koopman 2014) that individuates, aggregates and automates administration through digitalized metrics and big data. Unlike the reliance on the abstractions of auditing and consulting in neoliberal governance, Chinese policies bring together Marxist-Leninist emphasis on the mass line with cybernetic dreams of autonomous and automated digital governance. Perfecting a system of social management by which society governs itself coalesces in ideals of creating a predictive and responsive digitalized system of administration that avoids conflict before it even arises. Turning to green credits, particularly through the metric of carbon, this paper reveals how political accountability and environmental responsibility become recalibrated in moral terms and redistributed among citizens and corporations.
Miriam Hird-Younger (Carleton University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the experiences of civil society in Ghana that are increasingly expected to coordinate their work through trust-based networks. The paper finds that paying attention to everyday mistrust reveals the limitations of efforts to govern civil society through networks.
Paper long abstract:
"Our world is suffering from a bad case of trust deficit disorder," the United Nations Secretary General recently warned. For decades, trust has been a central tenet of foreign aid, resting on the notion that pervasive mistrust is an obstacle and that trust-building is a moral good that will foster the right kind of social relations for development (Li 2007). This paper explores how non-governmental organisations (NGOs) navigate the growing expectation that they work through trust-based collaborations. I focus on the experiences of an emerging platform of NGOs working on the Sustainable Development Goals in Ghana to ask how are NGOs enrolled in, contesting, and negotiating expectations to govern themselves through trust-based networks? As a country that has been called a "success story" of good governance, Ghana is an illustrative context to examine changing positions of civil society in development. In Ghana, the proliferation of networks is meant to streamline efficiency, coordination, and accountability in a complex and crowded civil society context. I argue that while these networks are underpinned by the idea that trust and collaboration are "good," it is often mistrust that characterizes the everyday realities of working in partnership. With increasing precarity and competition for funding, NGOs are suspicious and jealous of who benefits from the partnerships. I conclude that taking seriously the pervasive mistrust within networks reveals the precarious and highly political foundations of such networks and the ways that everyday practices often exceed the technomoral efforts to manage and govern civil society.
Susan Hyatt (Indiana University Indianapolis)
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork in Indianapolis, I argue that models for community development, that claim to build on local 'assets' rather than on 'deficits', serve to mask structural inequalities and promote particularly moralizing and potentially authoritarian visions for neighborhood growth.
Paper long abstract:
The slippage between technomoral projects and authoritarian regimes of governance can be seen in the context of neighborhood development programs, that seek to revitalize struggling communities by claiming to build on their local 'assets' rather than on 'deficits'. 'Asset-Based Community Development', or ABCD, has become a popular program for addressing local-level concerns and has been adopted by a range of rural and urban entities around the world. This model is embraced by both funders and local governments because it does not address or challenge structural inequalities and it can actually serve to quell dissent. Furthermore, ABCD imposes particularly moralistic judgements on those residents who do not embrace visions of futures that essentially advocate gentrification, representing such insurgents as lacking initiative or as pathologically dependent on government largess. These development programs also articulate with new platforms for electronic surveillance in ways that serve to control and police local dissent, and that are riven with assumptions about who constitutes a 'legitimate' community resident. In this paper, based on fieldwork in Indianapolis, I show how such regimes can no longer be understood as creating neoliberal subjects; rather, they are shading into authoritarianism and have become another conduit for channeling mobile capital into neighborhoods in ways that can result in the displacement of the very residents they claim to be empowering.
Yazan Doughan (London School of Economics (LSE))
Paper short abstract:
Rather than a quest for social justice, this paper argues that the criminalization of intercessory patronage in Jordan as a form of corruption, serves as a technology for constituting moral national subjects and governing bureaucratic intimacies.
Paper long abstract:
Upon joining the United Nations Convention Against Corruption in 2005, Jordan has moved to criminalize the widespread practice of intercessory patronage (known as wāsṭa) as a form of trading in influence, and hence corruption. Yet in the 14 years that have elapsed since, not a single case of wāsṭa corruption has resulted in a conviction. This paper investigates this discrepancy between the banality of wāsṭa, and its negative moral valuation as form of corruption, and between its criminalization and elusiveness. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research at the Anti-Corruption Commission, court cases, codes of ethics, and the everyday practices of street-level bureaucrats, I argue that the criminalization of wāsṭa functions not to achieve social justice, as commonly claimed, but to universalize a particular understanding of human life and action centered around the concepts of "interest" and the "conflict of interest". Within this framework, "interests" emerge as a salient object through which bureaucratic intimacies are governed, and the national moral subject is constituted.