Rising social, political and economic inequality in many countries, and rising protest against it, has seen the restoration of the concept of 'class' to a prominent place in contemporary ...anthropological debates. A timely intervention in these discussions, this book explores the concept of class and its importance for understanding the key sources of that inequality and of people's attempts to deal with it. Highly topical, it situates class within the context of the current economic crisis, integrating elements from today into the discussion of an earlier agenda. Using cases from North and South America, Western Europe and South Asia, it shows the - sometimes surprising - forms that class can take, as well as the various effects it has on people's lives and societies.
Financialization Chris Hann, Don Kalb / Chris Hann, Don Kalb
2020, 2020-08-01, Letnik:
6
eBook
Beginning with an original historical vision of financialization in human history, this volume then continues with a rich set of contemporary ethnographic case studies from Europe, Asia and Africa. ...Authors explore the ways in which finance inserts itself into relationships of class and kinship, how it adapts to non-Western religious traditions, and how it reconfigures legal and ecological dimensions of social organization, and urban social relations in general. Central themes include the indebtedness of individuals and households, the impact of digital technologies, the struggle for housing, financial education, and political contestation.
Critical junctions Don Kalb, Herman Tak / Don Kalb, Herman Tak
2005., 20050515, 2005, 2005-05-15
eBook
The “cultural turn” has been a multifarious and pervasive phenomenon in Western universities and modes of social knowledge since the early 1980s. This volume focuses on the conjunction of two ...disciplines where both the analytic promises as well as the difficulties involved in the meeting of humanist and social science approaches soon became obvious. Anthropologists and historians have come together here in order to recapture, elaborate, and criticize pre-Cultural Turn and non-Cultural Turn modes of analysing structures of experience, feeling, subjectivity and action in human societies and to highlight the still unexploited possibilities developed among others in the work of scholars such as Norbert Elias, Max Gluckman, Eric Wolf, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.
This article builds on the contributions of anthropologists of Europe in discovering, tracing and explaining the neo‐nationalist ascendancy of the last 20 years. It picks up on earlier publications ...to make a succinct case for a decidedly anthropological class analysis of this worldwide and world‐shaking phenomenon, with a view mainly on Europe and the United States. It suggests the usefulness of a notion of ‘double devaluation’ in understanding and explaining recent rightward shifts in popular politics in the Global North, encompassing both rural and urban spaces.
The past decades have seen significant urban insurrections worldwide, and this volume analyzes some of them from an anthropological perspective; it argues that transformations of urban class ...relationships must be approached in a way that is both globally informed and deeply embedded in local and popular histories, and contends that every case of urban mobilization should be understood against its precise context in the global capitalist transformation. The book examines cases of mobilization across the globe, and employs a Marxian class framework, open to the diverse and multi-scalar dynamics of urban politics, especially struggles for spatial justice.
Two theories of money Kalb, Don
Focaal,
03/2023, Letnik:
2023, Številka:
95
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Abstract
The last decade of financial crisis, “financialization” and “quantitative easing” has been a feast of public learning about money and finance. Anthropology, history, and political economy ...rediscovered a “forgotten” history of money as fundamentally a public good rather than basically a private one. This article discusses the rediscovery of the two competing basic historical theories of money. It also notes that, after a turbulent decade of class and political polarization, including a worldwide pandemic, we also learned that under capitalism it just cannot be publicly conceded that money, if we want to, costs nothing, even though that is scientifically true. The article then reflects upon the current return of inflation and the turn toward “hard and dear money,” and what that might mean.
March 2020. On the borders of EU Europe, with the Covid pandemic threatening human lives, sociality and welfare everywhere, Syrian refugees on the ‘Balkan Route’, bombed out of Idlib, are being ...beaten in the forests with wooden clubs by Romanian border guards before they are thrown back onto Serbian territory for further humiliations.1 Romanian return migrants, fleeing the Italian and Spanish Corona lockdowns en masse, are being told over the social networks that they should never have come back, contagious as they are imagined to be and a danger for a woefully underfunded public health system for which they have not paid taxes. Further South, the Mediterranean is once again a heavily policed cemetery for migrants and refugees from the civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa – collateral damage of Western imperial delirium and hubris – as Greece is being hailed by the European President for being the ‘shield’ behind which Europe can feel safe from the supposedly associated criminality. Viktor Orbàn, meanwhile, has secured his corrupt autocracy in Hungary for another indefinite stretch of years after the parliament gave him powers to singlehandedly fight the Covid pandemic and its long-run economic after-effects in the name of the Magyars and in the face of never subsiding threats from the outside to the nation. Orbàn will also continue, even more powerfully so now, to fight immigrants, gypsies, gays, feminists, cultural Marxists, NGOs, George Soros, population decline, the EU, and everyone else who might be in his way. Critique from the EU is in Budapest rejected as being ‘motivated by politics’. Vladimir Putin, too, has just been asked by the Russian parliament to stay on indefinitely in his regal position, so as to safeguard Russia’s uncertain national future. Erdogan of Turkey is sure to be inspired and will not renege from his ongoing and unprecedentedly brutal crackdown on domestic dissent and ‘traitors to the nation’ while his armies are in Syria and Libya. Turkish prisons will continue to overflow.All these, and manifold other events not mentioned here, are part of processes in the European East that have been continuous (as in ‘continuous history versus discontinuous history’) for at least a decade, all with a surprisingly steadfast direction. They appear to be diverse, occasioned by ethnographically deeply variegated and therefore apparently contingent events. Anthropologists, professionally spellbound by local fieldwork, are easily swayed to describe them in their singularities. But that singular appearance is misleading. These and similar events are systemically rooted, interlinked, produced by an uneven bundle of global, scaled, social and historical forces (as in ‘field of forces’) that cascade into and become incorporated within a variegated and therefore differentiating terrain of national political theatres and human relationships that produce the paradox of singularly surprising outcomes with uncanny family resemblances. These forces can be summarily described as the gradual unfolding of the collapse of a global regime of embedded and multi-scalar solidarity arrangements anchored in national Fordism, developmentalism and the Cold War, into an uncertain interregnum of neoliberalised Darwinian competition and rivalry on all scales, with a powerfully rising China lurking in the background. Neo-nationalism appears from within this unfolding field of forces as a contradictory bind that seeks to enact and/or re-enact, domestically and abroad, hierarchy and deservingness, including its necessary flip side, humiliation. That is one aspect of the argument I have been trying to make since the end of the nineties (for example Kalb 2000, 2002, 2004), when such forces began to stir in the sites that I was working on and living in: The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Hungary and Poland.That universalising argument is easily corroborated by events in the west of the continent, which paint a similarly cohesive though phenomenologically variegated picture.2 Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini are still credibly threatening to democratically overthrow liberal globalist governments in France and Italy on behalf of the ‘people’ and ‘the nation’, and against the elites, the EU, immigrants, the left and finance capital. Dutch politicians, in the face of the global coronavirus calamity, still believe one cannot send money to Italy and the European South lest it will be spent on ‘alcohol and women’. Anonymous comments in the Dutch press on less brutal newspaper articles often echo the tone of the one that claimed that Southern countries were mere ‘dilapidated sheds … and even with our money they will never do the necessary repair work’ (NRC 30 March 2020, comments on ‘Europese solidariteit is juist ook in het Nederlandse belang’). Until its impressive policy turn-around in April/May 2020 in the face of the Covid pandemic and the fast-escalating EU fragmentation amid a world of hostile and nationalist great powers, the German government did not disagree. It was Angela Merkel herself who set up the Dutch as the leaders of a newly conceived right-wing ‘frugal’ flank in the EU under the historical banner of the Hanseatic League to face down the federalist and redistributionist South. That Hanseatic banner suggested that penny-counting, competitive mercantilism and austerity, and its practical corollary, an imposed hierarchy of ‘merit’ and ‘successfulness’, must hang eternally over Europe. Britain, meanwhile, has valiantly elected to leave the EU in order to ‘take back control’ on behalf of what Boris Johnson imagines as the ‘brilliant British nation’ (The Economist 30 January 2020). It would like to refuse any further labour migrants from the mainland, and seek a future in the global Anglosphere, beefed up by a revitalised British Commonwealth where hopefully, when it comes to ceremony, not juridical equality but imperial nostalgia and deference will rule (see Campanella and Dassu 2019).
Building on the work of Jonathan Friedman and of Andre Gingrich and Marcus Banks, I explain the rise of populist, neonationalist sensibilities in Poland as a set of defensive responses by ...working-class people to the silences imposed by liberal rule. I trace in detail a sequence of all-around dispossessions experienced by Polish working-class sodalities since 1989, when activists with substantial legitimacy among organized workers had claimed de facto and de jure control over assets crucial for working-class reproduction. "Democratization" and "markets" were shrewd legal ways by which the new liberal capitalist state reappropriated and recentralized those assets from local constituencies. Meanwhile, the reputation of workers, whose fights with the party-state had been essential for regaining national sovereignty and establishing parliamentary democracy, was systematically annihilated in the public sphere by discourses of "internal orientalism."
Recent liberal political science analysis has highlighted media, manipulation, and populist political trickery in the apparently sudden rise of the new Right in Europe and the USA. I suggest that a ...robust engagement with the actual social transformations over which liberalism has presided since 1989 is imperative. Anthropological work on class processes and the rise of neo-nationalist populism in Central and Eastern Europe has been strong in developing a more relational, processual, and embedded vision. In the current paper, I am looking at the phases and spaces of the rise of illiberalism as a popular political sensibility in Central and Eastern Europe. In particular, I am interested in its gradual upscaling to the level of the nation state and, through the “Visegrad bloc” to the EU. I argue that both the emergence and step-by-step upscaling of illiberal political sensibilities are explained by class relational processes and the regionally uneven Polanyi-type “countermovements” against liberalizations that they brought forth.
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