Category Archives: Engaging Capitalism
Winnie Lem: Materialist Feminism, Migration, and “Affective” Labor: Mediations in Capitalist Reproduction
In the American Anthropologic al Association (AAA) panel on “Anthropology’s Public Engagement with Capitalism: Beyond Gifts versus Markets” (Chicago, 2013), Don Kalb and Patrick Neveling asked us to advance on the genealogies that prevail as alternatives to anarchist and Maussian envisionings of communalism and societies against the state. They entreated us to visit perspectives that […]
Luisa Steur: Indigeneity and Precariousness: Ontological Criticism Or Dialectical Force?
This piece, briefly, will argue that in studying and supporting the many indigenous movements that have emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century, a dialectical understanding of political identification processes and global capitalism dynamics is of key importance. I will also lay out how I came to this understanding through a combination of […]
Patrick Neveling: Capitalism: The Most Recent Seventy-Two Years
On 1 November 1950, two Puerto Rican males tried to shoot their way into the provisional White House in Washington, D.C., aiming to kill President Harry S. Truman. Allegedly, the assassins were members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, an underground resistance movement opposed to US colonialism on that Caribbean island and portrayed by a […]
Jaume Franquesa: Consolidating Power, Controlling the Future: Debt and Crisis in the Spanish Electrical Sector
In recent years, I have been studying the development of renewable energy in Spain with the aim of developing a better understanding of energy transitions. My research shows that energy transitions are nonlinear processes that open possibilities for new social arrangements, but it also highlights the ways that such new social arrangements rework inherited relationships […]
Gavin Smith: Intellectuals’ Contributions to Popular Mobilization and Strategic Action under Different Conditions of Possibility
The argument I make here is a fairly obvious one. It is that the spatially widespread insurrections in the global south during the ’60s, and especially their victories against France in Algeria, the United States in Southeast Asia, and Portugal in its various colonies, obliged anthropologists and historians on the Left to rethink the way […]
Jonathan Friedman: Did Someone Say Globalization? The Mystification of Intellectuals and the Cunning of History
In the fall of 2008, the “shock doctrine” came home to roost in the form of what has been referred to as a financial meltdown in the American but also increasingly larger segments of the world economy. Many were quite surprised, and there was certainly a sense of moral indignation about the entire affair. With media […]
Jane Collins: Reclaiming the Local in Movements against Inequality: A View from the United States
Many European nations have seen protests in 2013 as the state shifts its historic roles and responsibilities and protesters respond to cutbacks in public support as a breach of moral economy. At the same time, individuals and collectives have responded to austerity by creating and deepening forms of self-provisioning outside the realm of state and […]
August Carbonella: Dispossession and Emancipation: Reframing Our Political Imagination
Everywhere we look, it seems, we are faced with the human and environmental devastation caused by contemporary processes of dispossession. How we are to confront this is the urgent political question of the day. Not surprisingly, this question has reinvigorated scholarly interest in dispossession, much of it inspired by the work of David Harvey (2003) […]
Florin Poenaru: The Wealth of Nations: Nature as Capital and Eco-criticism as Anti-Capitalism
In autumn of 2013, Romania witnessed some of the biggest post-1989 protests. From September to early December, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in major cities. People were furious about the government making a deal with a Canadian mining multinational for an opencast mine in Roșia Montana, a small mining town located […]