Platform economies: Beyond the North-South divide

Platform economies are depicted as the foundation for a new era of economic production. This transpires through the incorporation of digital technologies and algorithmic operations into the heart of economic and financial practices. However, different assumptions are made about the effects of digital platforms depending on geographical location. While digital platforms are approached as inherent to processes of financialization globally, they are reduced to processes of financial inclusion when referencing the ‘Global South’. Analyses of financialization as a one-way-vector – Global North to Global South – overlook the variability, the limits, and responses to financialization. In contrast, a focus on market devices illustrates the specificities of value creation. An example of this is ‘the float’, a form of financial value generated by mobile telecommunication operators, mobile money issuers, and commercial banks in Africa. Through this lens, we see instances of both value subjugation and autonomization, evidence that the fault lines of value production generated by ambiguous market devices are obscured by the Global North/Global South frame

Crisis in history or crisis historiography

History in Financial Times sheds light on the historiography of contemporary finance. But there is a tension in the book that is inescapable: between the production of crisis historiography, on the one hand, and the practice of the concept of crisis, on the other. There is, in other words, a barely articulated distinction between crisis as a “metahistorical force” and crisis as a “peculiar, naturalist” category

[En]gendering the norms of customary inheritance in Botswana and South Africa

The article responds to the article by Weinberg in this issue. She traces the trajectory of court hearings concerning the contested inheritance of land in Botswana, which, after several prior judgements eventually resulted in a positive outcome for the woman litigants. I acknowledge the author’s key argument, which concerns the impact of power relations on the construction of customary law and the reproduction of knowledge in the courts. Certain versions of “custom” were promoted and others stilled to the disadvantage of women. I argue that the normative patterns of landholding are indeed gendered, but do not result in a binary structure of men and women. “Gender” should be disaggregated to take into account a range of status criteria within and across the categories of male and female in order to understand the differential impact of social relations on the outcomes of property struggles. The normative lines of property transmission frequently follow a logic of “family property” that allows for qualifying women to rights of property. Family property has vastly different social and legal consequences to private, individualised property rights. The corollary is that it is misleading to speak of the processes of succession to rights of access to, and control of customary property in terms of one-to-one “inheritance” of land. The concept of “living law” inadequately reflects these social dynamics.IBS

Anti-Crisis

Janet Roitman, ‘Anti-Crisis’, talk presented at the conference Possibility Matters, ICI Berlin, 4–5 December 2015, video recording, mp4, 36:41 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e151204_2

Queries on Cultural Capitalism

Abstract This is a review essay of three works which offer poignant critiques of analyses and representations of capitalism as a universal category. Through empirical case studies, the authors refine and even subvert the homogenization narrative of globalization and capitalist history, and the concomitant assertion of the inevitability of the unilinear integration of local 'tradition'-bound communities into the global space-time of modernity. However, through combined recourse to a historical sociology of actions and methodological individualism, certain authors fail to address sufficiently the theoretical quandary raised by the relationship between culturally constituted subject-positions (agency) and socio-economic or political organizations (structure). The problem of positing 'culture' as an auto-nomous—and hence potentially overdetermining-category remains. Further-more, while taking issue with the 'disenchantment' reading of capitalist history, these critiques of standard approaches to local capitalisms in terms of their correspondance to the founding model of Western capitalism ignore recent, critical reappraisals of the narrative of the very history of capitalim in the West. Increased attention to historical regimes of value and truth, as opposed to culturally inspired complexes of meaning, redirects analysis to the question of how power is involved in the construction of efficacious historical referents.Résumé Du capitalisme culturel. — Dans cet article les trois ouvrages analysés offrent, chacun à sa manière, une critique aiguë du capitalisme en termes de catégorie universelle. À travers des études de cas, les auteurs remettent en question les conceptions qui font de l'histoire du capitalisme à la fois une entreprise globalisante du monde et un processus d'intégration inéluctable, dans une modernité englobante, des différentes communautés traditionnelles. Cependant, bien que certains auteurs aient conjointement recours à une sociologie historique de l'action et à l'individualisme méthodologique, ils ne parviennent pas à résoudre la contradiction entre une approche fondée sur le mode d'agencement culturel de positions occupées par des sujets (« agency ») et une démarche reposant sur un principe d'organisation socio-économique ou politique (« structure »). Dans cette perspective, le problème de la définition de la culture en tant que sphère autonome, et donc potentiellement déterminante, reste en effet posé. En outre, bien que tenant compte des interprétations de l'histoire du capitalisme en termes de « désenchantement du monde », ces auteurs, critiques à l'égard de la thèse de l'universalité du capitalisme occidental, laissent néanmoins de côté les tentatives visant à réévaluer la pertinence du récit fondateur de ce système. Porter davantage d'attention au régime historique de valeur et de vérité plutôt qu'au système de sens à fondement culturel réoriente l'analyse vers la question de savoir comment le pouvoir est impliqué dans la construction de référents historiques efficaces.Roitman Janet. Queries on Cultural Capitalism. In: Cahiers d'études africaines, vol. 35, n°138-139, 1995. pp. 629-645

Adjacency and secession

What matters is not what we know but how we learn. This principle of inquiry shapes Paul Rabinow’s life work. It is also an ethics, an aspiration. This principle sustains the practice of problematization, or the delineation of zones of inquiry in terms of the conceptual interconnection of problems. In contrast to anthropological practice that is defined by the perpetual critique of existing relations, Rabinow assumes a mode of adjacency so as to consider the ways that we give form to objects of inquiry and to intelligible concepts. Adjacency is a commitment to actualize a differential—not to reproduce perpetual critique, but to practice inquiry as a mode of form-giving. And it entails secession, or a movement towards experimentation in diverse media. The secessionist move doesn’t revert to the authority of theory or ontology. It is a commitment to new forms, new futures, confidence in the future

The Garrison-Entrepôt

Abstract This text examines the meanings and material effects of the garrison-entrepot in the Lake Chad Basin. As an historical institution, the garrison-entrepot is a site where practices and significations which are both military and commercial are concretized. It takes part in the history of conquest and violent modes of violent accumulation (slaving, razzia, raiding) known to the region. Today, the normalization of violence associated with certain manners of accumulations is manifest. Furthermore, the political economy of the Chad Basin is such that the garrison-entrepot has become a site of redistribution and fiscal authority. It contributes to the intensification and expansion of regional commercial circuits which are the bases for the exercice of regulatory authority (rents, prestations, charges) and the control of labor (guards, couriers, smugglers, intermediares). The later maintain ambiguous relationships to the physical frontiers of the nation-state as will as those of national regulation. Doubtless, the garrison-entrepot is a historical form of power that completes with the nation-state. But the fiscal relationships that emerge out of this phenomenon of the frontier are essential to the quest for new forms of economic power in the region; they are often exploited and even encouraged by extant regimes. Indeed, this counter-fiscality is atthe heartof the redefinition of "economic citizenship" in the region today.Résumé L'entrepôt-garnison. — Ce texte analyse les significations et les effets concrets de l'« entrepôt de garnison » dans le Bassin du Tchad. L'entrepôt-garnison est une institution historique ; c'est le lieu où se contrétisaient autrefois des pratiques et des significations à la fois commerciales et militaires. Son histoire fait partie des conquêtes et des pratiques d'accumulation basées sur la violence (esclavage, razzia, spoliation). Aujourd'hui, la normalisation de la violence au service de certaines formes d'accumulation est évidente. De plus, l'évolution de l'économie politique dans le Bassin du Tchad est telle que l'entrepôt-garnison apparaît comme le site de la redistribution et de l'autorité fiscales. Il participe à l'intensification et à l'expansion des circuits commerciaux régionaux, à partir desquels s'effectuent la régulation (primes, prestations, rentes) et le contrôle d'une certaine main-d'œuvre (gardes, coursiers, contrebandiers, intermédiaires). Ces derniers maintiennent des relations ambiguës avec les frontières physiques et la réglementation nationale. Sans doute l'entrepôt-garnison est-il une forme historique de pouvoir qui concurrence l'État-nation. Mais les rapports fiscaux qui se dessinent à travers ce phénomène de frontière sont essentiels à la recherche de nouvelles assises du pouvoir économique dans le Bassin du Tchad ; ils sont souvent bien exploités et même encouragés par les régimes en place. En effet, cette contre-fiscalité est aujourd'hui au cœur de la redéfinition de la « citoyenneté économique » dans la région.Roitman Janet. The Garrison-Entrepôt. In: Cahiers d'études africaines, vol. 38, n°150-152, 1998. Disciplines et déchirures. Les formes de la violence. pp. 297-329