Category Archives: Blog

Focaal Volume 2017, Issue 77: Nonrecording states

We 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.

Bruce Kapferer: Ideas on populism: The paradox of democracy and the rise of the corporate state

“All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.” — Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right “The power of the people is always greater than that of the people in power.” — Wael Ghonim, a Google executive at […]

Florin Poenaru: Romanian protests: A cake with three layers (and a cherry on top)

In the past four weeks, Romania has witnessed some of the biggest protests in the post-communist era. Hundreds of thousands of people in cities across the country took to the streets to protest a government bill that would potentially decriminalize corruption offenses and therefore help the case of the ruling Social Democratic Party leader. Hence, […]

Stephen P. Reyna: Is Mr. Trump a legitimacy crisis?

In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, one US representative, John Lewis, fueled widespread media debates with a claim that he does not believe Mr. Trump to be a “legitimate” president. In a time when the many antagonizing executive orders and cabinet choices make these debates from mid-January appear like yesterday’s news, it is […]

Carlos de la Torre: Trump: Fascist or populist?

Douglas Kellner in American Nightmare writes, “certainly [Donald] Trump is not Hitler and his followers are not technically fascists, although I believe that we can use the term authoritarian populism or neofascism to explain Trump and his supporters” (2016: 20). Kellner is not the only analyst who uses the terms fascism and populism interchangeably to […]

Kate Crehan: Gramsci/Trump: Reflections from a fascist jail cell

Antonio Gramsci, condemned by Benito Mussolini to twenty years in prison, wrote his celebrated prison notebooks while sitting in a succession of fascist jails. He reflects on some of the following questions: why is Mussolini in power, while he and so many other leftists are in prison, dead, or in exile? What explained the defeat […]

Steven Sampson: Angry white males as suffering subjects

“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” —Barack Obama, in a speech to donors during his 2008 campaign The above remarks, made while Obama was running for president, are eight years old. […]

Focaal Volume 2016, Issue 76: Adivasi and Dalit political pathways in India

Gavin Smith: Out of the academic enclosure

Marc Edelman ends his recent piece on FocaalBlog, “The forces of justice and decency will need to move from feel-good slacktivism to the streets, to face-to-face engagement, whether lobbying, community organization, or classroom dialogues.” This got me thinking. In the following manner…[1]

Marc Edelman: The nastiest candidate won: Now what?

In the end it was filmmaker Michael Moore who got it right. It wasn’t Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, with his sophisticated polling models, or Nobel Prize winning economist and liberal pundit Paul Krugman, who confessed on election night that “I truly thought I knew my country better than it turns out I did.”