The marketization of poverty

Increasingly, transnational corporations (TNCs) see themselves, and are seen by multilateral development organizations and national governments, as part of the solution to global poverty alleviation. Guided by C. K. Prahalad's theories about the "bottom of the pyramid" (BoP), TNCs are developing products and services for the billions of people living on a few dollars a day that are supposed to enable these poor people to enterprise themselves out of poverty. In the process, poverty and the poor are made amenable to market interventions by being constituted as a potential new market for TNCs. Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) e-Inclusion program was the first corporate-wide BoP initiative in the high-tech industry that aimed to create corporate and social benefits. An analysis of its companyinternal evolution from an intrapreneurial initiative to a fully incorporated business operation is complemented by a study of e-Inclusion's activities in Costa Rica, which aimed to improve the lives of rural Costa Ricans by providing access to HP technology and by creating new sources of income for electronic entrepreneurs. However, transforming the poor into protoconsumers of TNC products and services cannot address the structural drivers of their circumstances and will lead to neither the eradication of poverty nor a corporate fortune at the BoP. © 2011 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved

The Vulnerable State and Technical Fixes: An Analysis of Official Climate Change Discourses in Nepal

I conduct discourse analysis of seven selected official climate change policies and documents of Nepal. In the first part of my analysis, I draw from international climate justice discourses to analyze how policy makers construct Nepal’s position in the global arena, in relation to the issue of climate change. In the second part, I draw from political ecology and anthropological understandings of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘adaptation’ to analyze how policy makers construct those terms in the context of Nepal. The result shows that Nepal has adhered to the ‘vulnerability’ and ‘transition’ discourses, which serve as important tools to advocate for financial support from the international climate change regime. Driven primarily by international processes and guidelines, the climate change policies and documents in Nepal project a heavily technocratic approach with little socio-cultural considerations. Vulnerability is understood as a static property and assessed based on sectors and geographic areas, while adaptation is understood as series of actions to be implemented. Overall, the policies are at risk of perpetuating the existing systemic ills, as well as impeding imaginaries to pursue more radical socio-political and cultural change as effective adaptation measures

Understanding Anthropological Understanding: for a merological anthropology

In this paper I argue for a merological anthropology in which ideas of ‘partiality’ and ‘practical adequacy’ provide a way out of the impasse of relativism which is implied by post-modernism and the related abandonment of a concern with ‘truth’. Ideas such as ‘aptness’ and ‘faithfulness’ enable us to re-establish empirical foundations without having to espouse a simple realism which has been rightly criticised. Ideas taken from ethnomethodology, particularly the way we bootstrap from ‘practical adequacy’ to ‘warrants for confidence’ point to a merological anthropology in which we recognize that we do not and cannot know everything, but that we can have reasons for being confident in the little we know

Race as Technology: From Posthuman Cyborg to Human Industry

Cyborg and prosthetic technologies frame prominent posthumanist approaches to understanding the nature of race. But these frameworks struggle to accommodate the phenomena of racial passing and racial travel, and their posthumanist orientation blurs useful distinctions between racialized humans and their social contexts. We advocate, instead, a humanist approach to race, understanding racial hierarchy as an industrial technology. Our approach accommodates racial passing and travel. It integrates a wide array of research across disciplines. It also helpfully distinguishes among grounds of racialization and conditions facilitating impacts of such racialization

What Can Anthropologists Do?: Applied Anthropology in a Conflict-Ridden World

This work examines the role of anthropology in conflict, post-conflict studies, and conflict resolution. Present research has asserted that Anthropology as a discipline must move forward with greater involvement in domestic and international conflict resolution, but no scholar nor activist has taken that leap. All anthropological research in conflict has pertained to forensic anthropology, expert witness testimony, and post-conflict ethnographic research— all completed after conflict has already ended. Many anthropologists have recommended involvement in actual conflict resolution, and many have advocated for further Ethnographic Peace Research. However, the role of anthropology continues to be questioned by the discipline itself as well as governmental agencies and other academic disciplines. Despite these objections, the agreement by the majority of anthropologists in conflict studies is that Anthropologists have the skills necessary to participate and aid in conflict resolution

Socially engaged art: the conscience of urban development

Book synopsis: Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology

Anthropologists behaving badly? Impact and the politics of evaluation in an era of accountability

This paper discusses the move within UK social science funding to use non-academic ‘impact’ as a measure of quality and success for social research. It suggests that behind this move are a set of unspoken assumptions about what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ impact, and the paper seeks to problematize these. By way of provocation, it presents three classic cases of anthropological research, in which the impact of anthropologists on the societies in which they worked was at worst reprehensible, and at best controversial. These controversies – Darkness in El Dorado, the Human Terrain System and Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood – are used to demonstrate the difficulty with which we can assess impacts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and the problems with attempting to do so