Mariya Ivancheva: The revolution will not be criticized? The (im)possibility of left-wing critique in Venezuela

This post is part of a series on the Latin American pink tide, moderated and edited by Massimiliano Mollona (Goldsmiths, University of London).

After heading the pink tide in Latin America, the Bolivarian government in Venezuela has most recently experienced significant challenges (Bolton 2016). With oil prices sinking, inflation skyrocketing, and consumption goods chains being blocked by commercial networks sympathetic of the opposition, the government has started losing support in its base. Gloating over power cuts and “food shortages”—or more accurately, deficits of certain consumables—opposition-supporting international and Venezuelan private media are hysterically preparing for a pyrrhic victory of the free market over socialism. Scandalized by ever-stronger reactions against Dilma Rouseff’s presidency in Brazil, Venezuelan government supporters home and abroad take an ever more defensive stance shielding the government from internal and external critique alike.
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Focaal Volume 2016, Issue 74: After dispossession

Focaal 74 coverWe are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology has recently published and is available online at its new home, www.berghahnjournals.com/focaal.

This issue’s theme section, titled “After dispossession” and guest edited by Oscar Salemink and Mattias Borg Rasmussen, addresses how seemingly global processes become entangled in local affairs in sub-Saharan Africa, a former Soviet republic, and Latin America. The editors’ introduction is available to all readers for free, and “Reclaiming the lake” is also temporarily free as a part of Berghahn’s Earth Day virtual issue.

Focaal 74 also includes a regular articles section and a forum piece by FocaalBlog’s very own Edward Simpson. As always, forums are freely available to all readers.



Volume 2016, Issue 74: After Dispossession

Guest Editors: Oscar Salemink and Mattias Borg Rasmussen

THEME SECTION

After dispossession: Ethnographic approaches to neoliberalization
Oscar Salemink and Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Reclaiming the lake: Citizenship and environment-as-common-property in highland Peru
Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Infrastructures of progress and dispossession: Collective responses to shrinking water access among farmers in Arequipa, Peru
Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen

Enemies of the people: Theorizing dispossession and mirroring conspiracy in the Republic of Georgia
Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen

Foregrounding possibilities and backgrounding exploitation in transnational medical research projects in Lusaka, Zambia
Birgitte Bruun

ARTICLES

“Communists” on the shop floor: Anticommunism, crisis, and transformation of labor in Bulgaria
Dimitra Kofti

Humanitarian mine action in Burma/Myanmar and the reterritorialization of risk
Ken MacLean

It was horrible, but we live now: The experience of young German adults in everyday encounters with the Holocaust
Lisa J. Krieg

FORUM

Is anthropology legal? Earthquakes, blitzkrieg, and ethical futures
Edward Simpson


Recommend Focaal to your library

As a key researcher in your field, you can recommend Focaal to your library for subscription. A form for this purpose is provided on the Focaal website here.

Ines Hasselberg: Enduring Uncertainty: Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life

Enduring Uncertainty is a volume of the “Dislocations” series published by Berghahn Books. The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neoliberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks, which reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically incisive responses.
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