Tag Archives: neoliberalism

Globalization discourse is deeply flawed in its very conception, expressing a gratuitous assumption of the emergence of a new era that is discontinuous with the past and whose conflicts are primarily the product of those who resist this development: nationalists, racists, localists. This discourse is itself an ideological product of a cosmopolitan elite identity that has emerged (again) in recent years and which can be accounted for, in turn, by another approach. A global systemic perspective situates cosmopolitan discourses in periods of hegemonic decline, which are also periods of economic, social, and cultural fragmentation in the hegemonic zones as well as of vertical polarization that creates a new “rootedness” at the bottom and a cosmopolitanization at the top. While these processes are underway today in the West, something quite the opposite is occurring in the emergent new hegemonic centers to the East. A global systemic approach also offers a model of today’s crisis that is absent in globalization discourse.

President Obama’s 2008 electoral triumph garnered enormous journalistic and scholarly attention, but analysts have shown very little interest in African American media coverage of the campaign. In this piece, I focus on one major, nearly ignored, black media outlet: a syndicated radio show with a huge audience, commercial success, and progressive politics. I analyze the show’s construction of a powerful mediatized black counterpublic, consider its rise parallel to the neoliberal deregulation of U.S. media, and narrate its coverage of the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. I also consider the political effects of a new cross-media platform synergy among black and progressive outlets.

Rheana Parreñas’s examination of orangutan–human encounters suggests how cultural anthropologists might pioneer a bolder approach to the analysis of social interactions of all sorts. All interactions, however closely acquainted the parties involved, require the interpretation of more or less inscrutable sounds and gestures. Engaging with this strangeness incites intensely felt bodily experiences that people only imperfectly translate into passions like love, fear, shock, and relief. Parreñas points the way both to a fuller understanding of the role of this sort of affect in neoliberalism and to richer alliances among the subfields of anthropology and between anthropology and the humanities and natural and physical sciences. These new alliances promise to provide us with new ways of understanding our entanglements with others who are always both familiar and strange.

With no local outlet to sell their corn harvests as a result of neoliberal policies, residents on the Mexico–Guatemala border pursued an alternative strategy. They mobilized to smuggle corn from Mexico to Guatemala and asserted that this constituted legitimate “free trade.” Residents reinterpreted free trade to imply their right to “freely” sell corn over the border, thereby challenging the implications of official free-trade policies that were anything but free. Yet, as locals participate in this growing trade and negotiate with state officials, they may contribute to the neoliberal economic dynamics, increasing regional inequalities, and patron–client state relations they otherwise protest.

Psychologists working in Russia’s cities have found it both desirable and profitable to offer “psychological education” to the children of the elite. I examine two characterizations of this work—as a form of neoliberal subjectivation and as a post-Soviet project focused on progressive sociopolitical reform. Exploring the tensions between them illuminates the historical specificity of self-work in Russia, its relation to commerce and biopolitics, and its political ambiguity. I conclude that studies of governmentality that attend to both subjectivation as an ethical practice and social history can effectively render capitalist complicity and ordinary ethics in the same frame.

In this article, I examine changing meanings of participation for grassroots community leaders in Porto Alegre, Brazil, since the 2004 defeat of the Workers Party (PT) municipal government and a subsequent rise in the presence of both the private sector and NGOs in community politics. Through an ethnographic analysis of community politics in one municipal district, based on interviews I carried out in 2008, I argue that the changing relationship between state, private sector, and civil society has contributed to destabilization of the narrative of active citizenship hegemonic in earlier years, implanting a market-oriented, individualistic ethos in its place.

Amidst a “crisis” of clandestine migration in West Africa, tales about the exploits of “missing men” circulated through Dakar, Senegal. In this article, I explore how these myths enabled debate about the changing parameters of male social visibility, nation building, and social success in the city at the same time that they paradoxically recast as spectacularly present men who had failed to achieve by these standards. I argue that both public discourse about and scholarly analysis of the impact of transnational migration on those left behind recenter the activities of some men, rendering invisible other modes of being and belonging.