Fixing Non-market Subjects: Governing Land and Population in the Global South

Expert knowledge about society and human nature is essential to governing human conduct.  It figures in the formulation of the liberal and neoliberal rationalities of government that Foucault analyzed in his later work.  It also figures in particular assemblages in which a governmental rationality is brought to bear on the definition of problems and the formulation of solutions.  This article explores the use of expert knowledge in governmental assemblages directed towards optimizing relations between people and land in the global south.  Since colonial times liberal versions of these assemblages have highlighted cultural difference, and attempted to fix particular populations into non-market niches.  Elements from liberal assemblages have been grafted into neoliberal ones, producing the curious figure of homo economicus minus the market, the collectivized and arborealized subject of contemporary conservation initiatives

Les engagements anthropologiques vis-à-vis du développement

Je propose de distinguer 3 types d’engagements anthropologiques face au développement, chacun d’entre eux étant accompagné d’un ensemble particulier de relations sur le terrain et de tensions caractéristiques. Pour moi, ces trois types d’engagements ne sont pas compatibles - ils ne sont pas connectés séquentiellement et ne sont habituellement pas conduits simultanément. D’où l’importance de nous situer, nous et nos pratiques, par rapport à eux. Ces trois types sont : L’anthropologie au servi..

Beyond the “proper job:” Political-economic analysis after the century of labouring man

This programmatic article proposes an approach to global political-economic inquiry in the wake of the failure of long-established transition narratives, notably the narrative centred on a universal trajectory from farm-based and “traditional” livelihoods into the “proper jobs” of a modern industrial society. The prevalence and persistence of “informal”, “precarious”, and “non-standard” employment in so many sites around the world, it suggests, requires a profound analytical decentering of waged and salaried employment as a presumed norm or telos, and a consequent reorientation of our empirical research protocols. The authors seek to further such a reorientation by identifying a set of specific political-economic questions that are in some sense portable, and can profitably be applied to a diverse range of empirical contexts around the world. But it is the questions that are shared, not the answers. By generating a matrix of difference and similarity across cases, the paper points toward a research agenda capable both of finding answers to concrete questions that arise in specific settings, and of generating comparative insights and the identification of large-scale patterns

Agrarian Differentiation and the Limits of Natural Resource Management in Upland Southeast Asia

Summaries Drawing upon research in the Southeast Asian uplands, especially Sulawesi, this article argues that excessive attention to managerial goals, such as the design of improved institutions, has occluded understandings of agrarian processes that radically reconfigure communities and the relations between people and land. Managerial interventions play a limited role in directing processes of agrarian differentiation, although they do set some of the conditions, often unwittingly. The limits of managerialism notwithstanding, the effort to understand political?economic processes affecting resource use and allocation is still worthwhile, for there are several possible uses for this kind of knowledge

Unraveling the geometry of the New England oroclines (eastern Australia): Constraints from magnetic fabrics

The southern New England Orogen (NEO) in eastern Australia is characterized by tight curvatures(oroclines), but the exact geometry of the oroclines and their kinematic evolution are controversial. Here we present new data on the anisotropy ofmagnetic susceptibility (AMS), which provide a petrofabric proxy for the finite strain associated with the oroclines.We focus on a series of preoroclinal Devonian-Carboniferous fore-arc basin rocks, which are aligned parallel to the oroclinal structure, and by examining structural domains, we test whether or not the magnetic fabric is consistent with the strain axes. AMS data show a first-order consistency with the shape of the oroclines, characterized, in most of structural domains, by subparallelism between magnetic lineations, “structural axis” and bedding. With the exception of the Gresford and west Hastings domains, our results are relatively consistent with the existence of the Manning and Nambucca (Hastings) Oroclines. Reconstruction of magnetic lineations to a prerotation (i.e., pre–late Carboniferous) stage, considering available paleomagnetic results, yields a consistent and rather rectilinear NE-SW predeformation fore-arc basin. This supports the validity of AMS as a strain proxy in complex orogens, such as the NEO. In the Hastings Block, magnetic lineations are suborthogonal to bedding, possibly indicating a different deformational historywith respect to the rest of the NEO

γ-Tubulin regulates the anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosome during interphase

Activation of the APC/C requires microtubule-nucleating independent aspects of γ-tubulin function

Assets and domestic units: methodological challenges for longitudinal studies of poverty dynamics

Tracking change in assets access and ownership in longitudinal research is difficult. Assets are rarely assigned to individuals. Their benefit and management are spread across domestic units which morph over time. We review the challenges of using assets to understand poverty dynamics, and tracking the domestic units that own and manage assets. Using case studies from longitudinal research we demonstrate that assets can afford useful insights into important change

The political economy machinery: toward a critical anthropology of development as a contested capitalist practice

This article discusses anthropology’s current mainstream understandings of development and offers a historical materialist alternative. According to these, development was and is either a discourse-backed anti-politics machine that strengthens the power of postcolonial governments or a category of practice, a universal that generates frictions when it clashes with local historical–cultural formations. The approach proposed here reintegrates the analysis of development into the anthropological analysis of capitalism’s uneven and contested histories and practices. A reassessment of World Bank reporting on Lesotho and an analysis of the Bank’s impact on the wider policies of development in postcolonial Mauritius, one of the twentieth century’s preeminent success stories of capitalist development, underlines that development is best understood as a political economy machinery that maintains and amends contested capitalist practices in an encounter with earlier global, national, and local historical–cultural formations