Category Archives: Blog
Menara Guizardi: Notes on the Political Capitalization of Anguish and Hope in Argentina (and the American Southern-Cone)
In recent work, several authors in anthropology have analyzed how the extreme right is being configured and acquiring a considerable pull on the mainstream (see: Kalb, 2023a; Semán & Wilkis, 2023, https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/05/11/pablo-seman-and-ariel-wilkis-rebellion-of-the-bastards-the-rise-of-the-extreme-right-in-argentina/). I want to take their reflections further and focus on the uncomfortable question about the role of “traditional” political forces in paving the […]
Markus Balkenhol: Apologizing for slavery: notes on a Dutch surprise
On 1 July 2021, 148 years after slavery ended in the Dutch West Indian colonies, Femke Halsema, the Mayor of Amsterdam, said: ‘For the active involvement of the Amsterdam City Council in the commercial system of colonial slavery and the global trade in enslaved people I, on behalf of the College of Mayors and Aldermen, […]
Chris Hann: Thanks, Türkiye
How does Recep Tayyip Erdoğan do it? In Spring 2023, the economy is in a mess, inflation accelerating, and corruption rife. Government aid in the wake of a devastating earthquake in Southeastern Anatolia on 6th February was badly mismanaged. The natural disaster revealed the structural shortcomings of poorly regulated construction and real-estate markets, symptomatic of […]
Pablo Semán and Ariel Wilkis: Rebellion of the bastards: the rise of the extreme right in Argentina
The growth of extreme right-wing forces in the Argentine political process expresses the combination of global trends and specific trends associated with local political history. It also expresses the need to understand the embeddedness of these political preferences in the social experiences shaped by the generalized decline of the middle and popular classes, sedimented in […]
Ewald Engelen: Another ‘populist’ shake-up in the Netherlands: the BBB revolt
The shock among the Dutch chattering classes on 16 March was palpable. The right-populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – established in 2019 by a small communications firm, bankrolled by the powerful Dutch agrifood complex and led by a former journalist for the meat industry – had in one go massively increased its vote share in the […]
Giorgos Poulimenakos & Dimitris Dalakoglou: Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece
On March 1st 2023, an impromptu protest rally took place outside the headquarters of Greece’s only railway company, Hellenic Trains (HT). HT is the passenger carrier of the recently privatized and formerly publicly owned carrier of Hellenic Organization of Railways. The word ‘Assassins’ and the phrase ‘Your profits, our deaths’ were written on the walls […]
Tomaso Ferrando: Beyond Speculation
On May 21, 2022 the cover of The Economist left no space to the imagination: a set of skulls replaced the grains of a wheat straw, and the world was soon going to experience a ‘Coming Food Catastrophe’. Although there is no doubt that the prospect of world food security looks anything but pleasant, I […]
Gavin Smith: Peru: the Uncertain State
Zavaleta: “[Apparent states] appear to be Western… in all respects but somehow they are not. What misfires here is a structural concept of sovereignty that is ultimately incompatible with the condition of non-centrality in the world, at least in history such as it has occurred until now…. They have only a vague sense of self-certainty, […]
Mihai Varga: Crisis-tested, yet forgotten: Family farms in wartime Ukraine
It was often said, in the course of the transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s, that Eastern Europeans are good at surviving. The IMF and the World Bank praised the local population’s capacity to “subsist” through small-scale agricultural production, “relieving” welfare budgets or helping shoulder the liberalization of prices. In fact, […]
FocaalBlog: Eric Wolf, Europe, Histories, Capitalism. Where are we now?
This panel was convened by Ida Susser at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2022 – Unsettling Landscapes. It builds on the workshop Vision and Method in Anthropology: Forty Years of Eric Wolf’s ‘Europe and the People Without History’, on 23/24 September 2022, organized in the framework of the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project at the […]