FocaalBlog is associated with Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. It aims to accelerate and intensify anthropological conversations beyond what a regular academic journal can do, and to make them more widely, globally, and swiftly available.

Conversations on the Left

  • Focaalblog: New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism

    Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology – IUAES, in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and FocaalBlog, organized a conference on the 26-27 May, 2022, in Budapest, addressing the escalating… more...

  • David Bozzini: Gabriella Coleman on the ethnography of digital politics – part 2

    David Bozzini is a research fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is researching on Eritrean deserters movements and on the resistance to digital surveillance. He co-edits Tsantsa, the journal of the Swiss Ethnological Society. Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist and holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University in… more...

  • David Bozzini: Gabriella Coleman on the ethnography of digital politics – part 1

    David Bozzini is a research fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is researching on Eritrean deserters movements and on the resistance to digital surveillance. He co-edits Tsantsa, the journal of the Swiss Ethnological Society. Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist and holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University in… more...

  • Zoltán Glück: Of politics and crowds: A conversation with Susan Buck-Morss

    This interview with Susan Buck-Morss took place at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center on May 12 2015. Buck-Morss is Distinguished Professor of Political Philosophy at the Graduate Center and has been a towering figure in continental theory since her publication of The Origin of Negative Dialectics in 1977. Her books include… more...

  • Ida Susser: From the underground resistance under Franco to Podemos, with Vicente Navarro

    Vicente Navarro is a leading analyst of the history and origins of the financial crisis in Spain (and Europe in general) and an economic adviser to Podemos. His book There Are Alternatives (Hay Alternativas: Propuestas para Crear Empleo y Bienestar Social en España), written with economists Juan Torres and Alberto Garzón, became an inspiration to… more...

  • Zoltán Glück: Archive of a Radical Geographer: Neil Smith’s Papers—An Interview with Don Mitchell

    In 2014, Don Mitchell was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Advanced Research Collaborative, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). His primary project during this time was to sort through the large collection of papers, files, clippings, and correspondences left behind by Neil Smith after his untimely death in… more...

  • Zoltán Glück: Focaal Interview with David Harvey – Part 2

    The Conversations on the Left project by Focaal opens its series with an interview with David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. David Harvey’s works have had a profound impact on the direction of leftist social science over the past four decades. A few months before this interview, in May 2013, an impressive… more...

  • Zoltán Glück: Focaal Interview with David Harvey

    The Conversations on the Left project by Focaal opens its series with an interview with David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. David Harvey’s works have had a profound impact on the direction of leftist social science over the past four decades. A few months before this interview, in… more...

Forum

A regular feature of Focaal is its Forum section available here online for free. The Forum features assertive, provocative, and idiosyncratic forms of writing and publishing that do not fit the usual format or style of a research-based article in a regular anthropology journal. Forum contributions can be stand-alone pieces or come in the form of theme-focused collection or discussion. Dipankar Gupta—Misreading Capital: The makings of Weber, Arendt, and Friedman
Douglas R. Holmes—Fascism at eye level: The anthropological conundrum
Sindre Bangstad, Bjørn Bertelsen, and Heiko Henkel—The politics of affect: The rise of far-right and right-wing populism in the West
Hadas Weiss—Reclaiming Meillassoux for the age of financialization
Richard H. Robbins—An anthropological contribution to rethinking the relationship between money, debt, and economic growth
Katharina Bordirsky—The commons, property, and ownership: Suggestions for further discussion
Isak Niehaus—Anthropology at the dawn of apartheid: Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski’s South African engagements, 1919–1934
Katharina Bodirsky—From the “state-idea” to “politically organized subjection”: Revisiting Abrams in times of crisis in Turkey and EU-Europe
Edward Simpson—Is anthropology legal? Earthquakes, blitzkrieg, and ethical futures
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer—Local legacies of the GULag in Siberia: Anthropological reflections Maria Theresia Starzmann—Global privatized power: Heritage politics and private military contractors in Iraq
Gavin Smith—Anthropological practice: Ethics and dilemmas Jonathan Parry—The anthropologist's assistant (or the assistant's anthropologist?): The story of a disturbing episode David Mosse—Misunderstood, misrepresented, contested? Anthropological knowledge production in question
John Clarke—Conjunctures, crises, and cultures: Valuing Stuart Hall
Don Kalb—On the reunification of anarchism and Marxism in world anthropology
Tommaso Bobbio—Never-ending Modi: Hindutva and Gujarati neoliberalism as prelude to all-India premiership?

 Forging the urban commons

Ida Susser and Stéphane Tonnelat—Transformative cities

Susan Narotzky—What kind of commons are the urban commons?

Jane Collins—The urban public sector as commons: Response to Susser and Tonnelat

Alain Bertho—Urban commons and urban struggles

Ida Susser and Stéphane Tonnelat—Transformative cities: A response to Narotzky, Collins, and Bertho


Daniel M. KnightThe Greek economic crisis as trope 
 James G. CarrierAnthropology after the crisis
Spaces of exception: The private administration of populations in the North and the South

Unfolding the crease in liberal republican citizenship: An introduction to the post-colonial critique of Andrés Guerrero, Christopher Krupa

Echoes arising from two cases of the private administration of populations: African immigrants in twentieth-century Spain and Indians in nineteenth-century Ecuador, Andrés Guerrero

Andrés Guerrero, Tristan Platt

Silence, echo, theory, Mark Thurner

The phantasy of theory and the missing people, João Biehl and Sebastián Ramírez Hernandez

Reply to Commentators, Andrés Guerrero


Iran at the crossroads of democracy and dictatorship Jakob Rigi
Civilizational analysis for beginners Chris Hann
Wal-Mart, American consumer citizenship, and the 2008 recession Jane Collins
 Sexular fantasies: The Occident and its religious Others

 Sexular practice: Notes on an ethnography of secularism, Oskar Verkaaik and Rachel Spronk

Naming our sexualities: Secular constraints, Muslim freedoms, Katherine Pratt Ewing

The nationalization of desire: Transnational marriage in Dutch culturist integration discourse, Willem Schinkel


Our 1989s

My long 1989: Anticipations of a new Europe, Douglas R. Holmes

Bridges to the future: Hungary's gradual transformationBéla Greskovits

Reflections on 1989: When Poland’s future opened up, Solidarity’s sense of agency disappeared, David Ost

My multiple, manifold, and endlessly contested 1989s, Don Kalb

Remembering 1989 and its aftermaths in the depths of Russia, Caroline Humphrey

A Romanianist's perspective on 1989, Katherine Verdery

Buried in the rubble of communism, Michael Burawoy


New lamps for old? Why Veblen beats the Nobel Laureates Keith Hart
Ostrom, the commons, and the anthropology of “earthlings” and their atmosphere Dan Rabinowitz

 What makes our projects anthropological?

Culture and praxis in post-modern times, Kirk Dombrowski

Emergent anthropologies, Douglas R. Holmes

Coincidences as connections: “Reading across” disciplines while “reading from” anthropology, Jane K. Cowan


 Accumulation by dispossession and Asia's modernizing Left

What's left? Land expropriation, socialist "modernizers," and peasant resistance in Asia, Luisa Steur and Ritanjan Das

The meaning of Nandigram: Corporate land invasion, people's power, and the Left in India, Tanika Sarkar and Sumit Chowdhury

"Communist" dispossession meets "reactionary" resistance: The ironies of the parliamentary Left in West-Bengal, Projit Bihari Mukharji

Land expropriation, protest, and impunity in rural China, Bo Zhao

Agricultural land conversion and its effects on farmers in contemporary Vietnam, Nguyen Van Suu

Critical perspectives on development

Social reproduction, situated politics, and The Will to Improve, Tania Murray Li

International policy, development expertise, and anthropology, David Mosse

Development, trans/modernities, and the politics of theory, Arturo Escobar


Putting neoliberalism in its place(s)

Living with/in and without neo-liberalism, John Clarke

Reflections on neo-liberalism in Africa, Peter D. Little

Thinking about neo-liberalism as if specificity mattered, Donald M. Nonini

Neo-liberalism: Dominant but dead, Neil Smith

Reply: Power, politics, and places: What's not neo-liberal? John Clarke


What is interpretation? A cultural neurohermeneutic accountSteve Reyna
The making of terrorists: Anthropology and the alternative truth of America's 'War on Terror' in the Sahara, Jeremy Keenan
The Sydney riots, Andrew Dawson
On transition and revolution in Kyrgyzstan, Mathijs Pelkmans
No end to Nepal's Maoist rebellion, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka

American imperialism? "The current runs swiftly," Steve Reyna

Comments on Reyna: from string beings to empire au vinaigre, Jonathan Friedman


Between Budennovsk and Beslan, Zaindi Choltaev and Michaela Pohl
And a merciful God did not come: a reflection on John Kerry's Viet Nam quagmire, August Carbonella
Europe, the Pope and the Holy Left Alliance in Poland, Kacper Pobłocki
Anthropological adventures with Romania's Wizard of Oz, 1973–1989, Katherine Verdery