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In June 2013, a series of large demonstrations throughout Brazil started to shake its main cities and political landscape. In this article I juxtapose these protests, the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s that brought the poor peripheries of Sao Paulo to the center of the political scene, and the cultural production coming from these peripheries after the 1990s. This juxtaposition creates a perspective from which to look at the changes that have transformed cities, citizens, and the polity in Brazil during the last decades. One of my main arguments is that in Sao Paulo, as in many other metropolises shaped by peripheral urbanization, political agency is inseparable from the spatial configuration of the city and from its shifting patterns of spatial segregation and social inequality. I focus on the peripheries and argue that the quality of both poverty, the urban environment, and citizens’ engagement have changed a great deal from the 1970s to the present. Poverty has different signifiers in a city o...

Nonstate providers are often more important in the everyday lives of the poor than outposts of the state. In this essay, I focus on one type of provider, sectarian organizations, which are an integral component of politics and welfare regimes in parts of the Middle East and other developing regions. Focusing on Lebanon, I describe how sectarian welfare providers emerge from and help to constitute political sectarianism while tracing what is at stake for the poor. First, by holding public offices and dominating informal channels that mediate access to public benefits, these actors mediate the experience of accessing the “rights” of citizenship. Second, while they provide benefits and services that might not otherwise be available, the modes of allocating welfare by sectarian parties can be discriminatory, notably along partisan and religious lines. Third, sectarian groups politicize the process of accessing social benefits while undercutting the political voice of the poor by weakening alternative channels...

This study of La Salada, renamed by Cuartel’s residents as the “poor people’s shopping mall,” was founded in the early 1990s, at the height of neoliberalism, by several dozen undocumented Bolivian immigrants and Argentine street hawkers in Cuartel, a pauperized, stigmatized, and disenfranchised district near the city of Buenos Aires. By the early 2000s, La Salada occupied a central place in public life in Cuartel and beyond and was described by the European Union as “emblematic of counterfeit markets” and among the 10 worst of its kind. In studying this market and the network of satellite “Saladitas” that have proliferated in hundreds of neighborhoods across the country, my aim is to analyze the way the “structural poor” and the recently impoverished middle class—in the course of practicing noninstitutional politics, socioeconomic informality, and a-legality—transformed themselves into plebeian citizens. These practices have contributed to the emergence of a new form of life: plebeian democracy. In order ...

How do we explore the relationship between the urban poor and large-scale revolutions? What kind of politics do they espouse in such extraordinary times? In this article I narrate the story of the poor people’s struggles for sustenance and citizenship during and after the Arab uprisings, focusing on Egypt and Tunisia. I suggest that while the abject poor and rural migrants avoid direct involvement in large-scale uprisings, the nature of which they do not comprehend, the “middle-class poor,” a product of the neoliberal restructuring, tend to engage in and lead others to these broader revolts. But most take advantage of the collapse of state control to extend their everyday struggles to secure life chances in their immediate environs—neighborhoods and work sites. This is also a time when they engage in extraordinary mobilization and organized protests to demand collective consumption and recognition as legitimate citizens of the city. Yet in the aftermath of the revolutions, when the new elites show their i...

Rather than being sedentary strata of urban existence, the urban poor move in and out of heterogeneous transformations, becoming a body of critical experimentation in ongoing calibrations of circulation and emplacement. They are sometimes the “wild cards” of urbanization itself, less excluded from rights and livelihood or a reserve surplus of wasted lives than vehicles for both conjoining and disrupting clearly delineated sectors, territories, and policies. Reviewing various dynamics of local economic practice, provisioning systems, and the built environment in Jakarta, in this article I explore the ambiguous presence of the poor in contemporary urban systems of the so-called global south.

Poverty and violence crisscross ethnographies of the African city. This is especially pronounced in anthropological research from South Africa, where considerable efforts are made to describe and document poverty and violence across segregated cityscapes. Correlations between poverty and vulnerability are often asserted in the literature: the “poorest of the poor” are presented repeatedly as the persons most susceptible to violence and harm. In this paper I aim to complicate how poverty and vulnerability are conventionally linked. Drawing from fieldwork on young African migrants’ informal work in Cape Town, I show how hazardous slight gains in prosperity can prove. Once the migrants’ entrepreneurial ventures took off, the youths were recast quickly as persons of suspicion and acceptable targeting. I present an episode in counterpoint of other migrants losing their property and means of livelihood. Countering expectations, these migrants’ descent into poverty’s inconspicuousness protected them during an ou...

This paper examines campaigns in two US social movements, an African American unionization struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, and a recent environmental justice campaign in a Latina/o community. These and the larger movements of which they are a part have been movements of the most economically precarious sectors of the population and have also been historically reliable sources of hope and inclusive regimes of economic and civic value. These regimes manifest in everyday ways that participants in these campaigns construct economic value and in how they link that economic value to their claims for full civic membership. I develop the concept of economic citizenship—namely, that clashes over economic values and social worth are double stranded and mutually constituting. That is, economic regimes of value (capitalist and otherwise) are key to constituting social worth and civic belonging, and notions of civic worthiness in turn constitute economic value.

Over the last two decades, rapid urban expansion building on landgrabs has become ubiquitous in China. The pursuit of urban-centered economic growth has created crises of land deprivation and rural identity in Chinese rural society. Land-related protests have become the focal point of movements for the protection of Chinese farmers’ rights. Drawing on ethnographic materials concerning a series of influential protests over landgrabs in Wukan village, this paper presents a critical rethinking of the economy and an examination of how the restoration of villagers’ collective identity has led to communal resistance that has successfully reclaimed governing power and social order, sowing the seed of hope for a better life. A revitalized and reinvented clan system organized around extended kinship networks has played a critical role in reconstituting the collective identity of villagers. The Wukan events constitute the first steps in an ambitious project to turn around farmers’ subordinate and vulnerable role wi...

In this article I explore how financialization works among the poor, based on the case of a group of migrants living in Barcelona’s urban periphery, who were granted mortgages during the climactic years of the Spanish housing boom (2004–2007). I argue that the hopes and values that underpin relations of reciprocity among the disadvantaged are transformed as they start accessing home ownership via predatory loans. Undeniably, forms of financial exploitation are rooted in and depend on a high degree of commodification. However, people tend to deal with the abstract logics of accumulation that underpin their domination through concrete interpersonal relations framed by moral values and mutual obligations.

This essay examines the long-standing Malagasy role of vadimbazaha, a word that literally means “the spouse of a European.” Malagasy women have historically aspired to this role to gain status and wealth as intermediaries who link social networks, enabling the flow of wealth, people, and opportunities among families. Prior generations of vadimbazaha stayed in Madagascar. Today, in the context of economic hardship, women seek European men and migrate to France. Their goal is to use their position in France to build a life-sustaining flow of resources back to Madagascar. Women achieve this goal by managing their French husbands’ and Malagasy kin’s horizons of expectation with respect to race, gender, kinship, and reputation. Understanding vadimbazaha’s economic practice requires attending to their ability to manage the meanings associated with their sexual, reproductive, and caring labor as much as the money they earn through low-wage labor and remittances.

The right to health and life is firmly established in the industrialized world, and advanced age is no longer a reason to deny medical treatment. Yet scarce and expensive medical resources, changing demographics, and expanding societal demands reveal how that right is more controversial than ever before. The case of kidney transplantation in the United States is a quintessential example of a broad health equity predicament in which the potential for greater longevity brings with it the problems of fairness and equity. As those over 70 and 80 come to constitute more of the “public” in aging societies, how then are nations to reconstitute the practice of fairness and the idea of public good? This essay examines this quandary by describing the potentiality we assign to kidneys, older persons, and the organ supply itself and by exploring the effects of that potentiality in three realms: schemes for fairness in the US organ transplant distribution system, living donation from younger to older persons, and the ...

Focusing mainly on Asia, this article tracks a link between the collective, inalienable land‐tenure regimes currently associated with indigeneity and attempts to prevent piecemeal dispossession of small‐scale farmers through land sale and debt. Collective landholding is sometimes imposed by local groups on their own members as they act to defend their livelihoods and communities. More often, however, it has been imposed from outside, first by paternalistic officials of the colonial period and now by a new set of experts and advocates who assume responsibility for deciding who should and who should not be exposed to the risks and opportunities of market engagement. From the perspective of their proponents, however, attempts to institutionalize collective landholdings are not impositions at all. They simply confirm a culturally distinct formation naturally present among “tribal” or “indigenous” people. Yet rural populations have repeatedly failed to conform to the assumptions embedded in schemes designed fo...

Drawing on fieldwork among environmental activists and housing advocates in one of South Asia’s fastest‐growing cities—and the capital of one of the world’s most politically volatile nation‐states—this article explores how and when specific forms of urban housing were problematized and reformed through environmental logics. I ask when and how housing was framed as an environmental problem in Kathmandu. In so doing, I demonstrate that a fuller understanding of housing as an environmental problem rests not only in evaluations of public health parameters, risks of toxic exposure, and disaster vulnerability but also in the shifting ideologies of belonging, morality, and governance that animate urban environmental anxieties in specific cities. I illustrate how categories fundamental to the intersection of ecology and housing were produced, effaced, and reproduced over time in Nepal’s capital. I argue that the making and unmaking of these categories had clear material consequences that are often difficult to di...

The global eminence of the United States is diminishing relative to non-Western economic, political, and cultural formations. Despite its unprecedented military superiority, its compromised recent attempts to assert dominance through armed occupation and economic pressure underscore the growing importance of non-Western cultures and political economics. Amid the proliferation and permutation of neoliberalism abroad-including alternative forms of capitalist development and political and religious self-determination-American efforts to extend its hegemony in the Gramscian sense are opposed by national and transnational self-assertion, states of insurgency, and capitalist competition. Dynamics of resistance and resurgence in various world areas rival and recast American political, economic, and cultural influence. Understanding these emergent processes, which portend the provincialization of America, will be pivotal for sociocultural anthropology in the twenty-first century. Comprehending new developments will require fresh combinations of an anthropological perspective with comparative political economy, international relations, the ethnography of the state, geographies of cultural resistance, and networks of transnational, national, and subnational influence.

Biological anthropologists are being urged to pay greater attention to politics and economics in health analyses. Rather than building larger and larger models in which health is merely an output, it is more useful to focus on the way in which political and economic circumstances create local biologies which in turn become a focus for further policy development. Analysis of historical changes in developmental defects of tooth enamel in a group of Warlpiri people resident at Yuendumu, Australia, reveals increases in the frequency of these defects and a changing age distribution from 1890 to 1950. This reflects the changing economic situation and government policies affecting Aboriginal people. Government officials had a particular construction of “traditional” Aboriginal lifestyles that contributed to their policy of establishing settlements. The settlements then served to create a uniform pattern of childhood growth and development which was one stimulant to further changes in policy. In this instance a p...

A new master plan to restructure the city of Kunming in southwestern China in the context of Chinas transition to a progrowth, commercialized consumer society has led to massive destruction of centuryold innercity neighborhoods and the displacement of tens of thousands of families. The combination of a sense of lateness (lagging behind national and global development) and an emerging progrowth coalition between local governments and real estate developers is shaping postMao urban redevelopment. Several forms of civic opposition and popular discontent have been elicited by the restructuring. Although largely marginalized, these alternative views of urban forms and counterpractices help sustain a muchneeded critical point of view that questions and destabilizes the seemingly inescapable machine of development. The insights emerging from the Kunming example help deepen our understanding of latesocialist power dynamics and suggest a new way of understanding stateinitiated projects of modernity and development...

The emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa after the decolonization revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s has resulted in a renewed concern with the problems of government in multiethnic, multireligious, and multilinguistic countries. I discuss the issues thus produced, including the viability of states that are not underpinned by a compact and sovereign nation, and the role anthropology can play in clarifying such issues.

Ethnographic characterizations of pastoralists as egalitarian have recently been contested on the grounds that new studies have demonstrated a widespread inequality in livestock ownership, thus proving that the notion of pastoral egalitarianism is a myth. This revisionist rejection of the egalitarianism of pastoralists appears difficult to sustain after examination of the literature. Ethnographic accounts show a wide range of pastoral societies, some more hierarchical and some quite egalitarian, and this variation was well recognized by at least 1940. “Egalitarian” is used in the literature to characterize pastoral tribesmen primarily in a political rather than an economic sense. Differences in livestock ownership were recognized by ethnographers characterizing the peoples they studied as “egalitarian”, but these differences were known not to cause either social stratification or economic class differentiation. To suggest as the revisionists do that all societies and cultures are characterized by inequali...

One of the most significant transformations in the emergence of economically and socially complex societies has been the development of social groups with differential access to productive resources. Anthropologists have puzzled over the number of empirical cases suggesting that women have disproportionately lost access to productive resources. This paper follows one such case—the development of textile workshops in Mesopotamia—to offer new insights into the alienation of women producers in the ancient Near East and the development of Mesopotamia's political economies. During the transformation from a series of relatively self‐sufficient communities to a highly integrated complex of rural and urban settlements, a fundamental shift took place from the use of flax to the use of wool for the majority of textile production. This shift has extremely important implications for archaeologists' reconstructions of agricultural production, labor roles, and social relationships. This paper explores the socioeconomic...

It has been pointed out that in stratified societies, the evolutionary viability of the state rests in large part on the perfection of institutional structures that protect the ruling class from confrontation with coalitions of educated commoners. This paper makes use of historical materials from various parts of India, as well as contemporary material from one part of India, Tamilnadu, to examine the role of the caste system in preventing the formation of social classes with any commonality of interest or unity of purpose. Analyzing caste from the point of view of those at the bottom, the paper attempts to show that, like social stratification systems the world over, caste has functioned (and continues to function) as a very effective system of economic exploitation. In the context of India's determination to create a socialist state, it appears impossible to bring about significant social change without a breakdown of the barriers between poor untouchables and other poor people. The paper suggests that,...

An anthropological study of Zaire's clan structures plays a valuable role in the acquisition of information that is essential to rural development planning in that country. In the final analysis, clan relationships give rise to socioeconomic and cultural behaviour patterns that are at variance with behaviour in a modern type of economy, which is geared to the profit of the individual. The organization of work, of production, and of profit distrition and the concepts of savings and reinvestment contrast significantly with clan practices. Although clan structures constitute only one of many systems of social interaction or association, in the light of the socioeconomic effects observed in this example the anthropological approach can be used to point up obstacles as well as incentives inherent in a given society in confronting problems of socioeconomic development. Nevertheless, the importance of careful study of the populations concerned in undertaking local development and its planning should not overshad...

This article analyzes the changes in the family that have taken place in Turkey, beginning with the structural changes and the collapse of the extended family that resulted from the parceling out of the land, a product of demographic pressure and the new agrarian regime that favors parcelization. But since the extended family no longer predominates in Turkey, the author stresses that economic and structural analysis alone is insufficient to account for the changes affecting family life and proposes a study of the modernization policies and the secularization brought about in Turkey through more than half a century of republican legislation. She also advocates taking culture into account in explaining the situation of the family. It appears that in Turkey there is a cultural tradition with regard to the family involving relationships of interdependence that is not incompatible with industrial development. Since rural exodus and urbanization have not resulted in the dissolution of kinship ties and the famil...

This article deals with discussions of economic development among Turkish intellectuals in the 1930s, when the characteristics of a "Kemalist development strategy" were being defined. As an exercise in the history of economic thought, it attempts to show that those discussions anticipated many of the issues of development economics, a special field which appeared only after the Second World War. The discussion challenges the general lack of concern for ideas emanating from underdeveloped countries to point to a hitherto unexplored source of insights that might be useful for a reorientation of development economics. Such a reorientation now seems urgently called for given the increasing perception of a serious methodological crisis in the subdiscipline. To a large extent, this crisis has to do with its ethical and political aspects-aspects that challenge Western scholars struggling with cultural barriers and that intellectuals from underdeveloped countries may be better equipped to deal with. The Turkish d...

In the context of an FAO seminar on agricultural planning and population, the author shows what the anthropologist can contribute to the analysis of this kind of problem. The case put forward is based on five years of field research in Chad and Cameroon from 1958 to 1976, among the Masa, Musey, Tuburi, and Kera. Their demography, production system, and social organization are examined. In a regional framework large enough to warrant a fresh planning effort, it seems technically feasible to improve the agricultural production and monetary income of the groups involved, provided that the local situations are analyzed sufficiently finely. An anthropological approach is required to uncover the cultural factors on which demographic change largely depends. The main factors are an economically very constraining marriage system and a processs of cultural assimilation by the dominant Islamic populations that has profound historical resonance and is reinforced by contemporary political change. Considering their und...

In recent years anthropologists have been taking an increasing interest in the process of urbanization in Africa, usually seen as an aspect of the wider issue of social and/or cultural change. As individual studies accumulate, we need to develop a framework within which to examine the variables that shape the structure of social relations in modern African towns and cities. Three main determinants of urban social structure are isolated and analyzed: (1) the "industrial" structure, i.e., the organizational framework through which the town seeks to achieve those economic aims and purposes that brought it into existence, or give it its present importance; (2) the "civic" structure, which derives from the policies and practices of its administration; and (3) the demographic factor, which involves the nature and degree of movement of population between rural and urban areas. In the light of these variables, the structure of social relations in the town itself may be examined. The discussion focuses mainly on t...

This article discusses the reproductive strategies of individuals in an attempt to determine whether they are designed to maintain an optimum population for the group or to insure reproductive success for the offspring. Some scholars have argued that aspects of social behavior from male display and dominance hierarchies to territoriality were mechanisms to control population growth and prevent resource depletion. Cultural ecologists in turn built theories of human social systems regulated by practices to limit population growth and deploy groups in time and space for the efficient use of their resources. Informed by anthropological generalizations demographers viewed recent high rates of population growth in the developing countries as the legacy of colonial interruptions of traditional practices which were assumed to have maintained optimum numbers in the precolonial past. While anthropologists and demographers adpoted the view that traditional peoples usually practice the discipline of optimum numbers this notion of population regulation suffered a very different fate in biology. Biological arguments made it clear that individuals reproductive interests and long-term group or population homeostasis would not always favor the same patterns of behavior.

By all accounts one of the most successful and important anthropological conferences ever held was "Man the Hunter" (see Lee and DeVore I968). The Fourth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, held at the London School of Economics September 8I3, I986, was planned with this conference in mind, as a twentieth-year stock-taking. Yet, while "Man the Hunter" was perceived as a one-shot evaluation of the prehistoric, recent, and present condition of the world's hunting societies, the I986 conference is clearly part of a series generated by the renewal of interest which followed the (First) International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies held in Paris in I978.2 The Paris conference was convened to explore in a global way the foraging life-style, with emphases on kinship and symbolism as well as on economic activities. All sessions were plenary, and the proceedings had a formal character due in part to the presence of microphones between each two participants. The Second International, held at Quebec in I980, was organized differently, with two sessions running concurrently almost throughout the conference, and as a result failed either to build a consensus or to polarize participants along any overall theoretical lines. The Third, in Bad Homburg, in I983, was very small by the standards of the others and emphasized historical studies.3 The Fourth, planned and organized by James Woodburn (London School of Economics), Tim Ingold (University of Manchester), and nine other U.K.based anthropologists, was designed to take account of the best features of the earlier meetings and to cover both topics of ongoing interest generated by the earlier ones and new areas of interest, especially those traditionally associated with anthropology in the United Kingdom. In the egalitarian spirit of hunter-gatherer society, the organizers also sought to bring together established and younger scholars on an equal basis. Most of the II4 participants made presentations (some jointly), and the programme included 76 papers, two films, and three concluding addresses. The conference opened with a session on comparative studies. Alain Testart (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme) introduced the topic of sharing, which was to be a major focus throughout the conference. He proposed a distinction between societies in which game is shared out by the hunter (e.g., the Inuit) and those in which it is shared out by a second party (e.g., the Australian Aborigines) and argued that the mechanisms of distribution in each case account for differences in kinship and other aspects of social structure. The model was challenged on ethnographic grounds by some of the Australianists present but provided a baseline for much discussion. Other papers in this session dealt with more specific comparisons, notably in the classification and explanation of the diversity of settlement patterns, and with the management of risk. Of the latter, that of Robin Torrence (University of Sheffield) provoked the first of the many significant arguments between the archaeologists and the social anthropologists present. Torrence, herself an archaeologist, implicitly equated technology with material culture and put forward the idea that a focus on the avoidance of risk rather than on the opposition between material and social factors in production should bring archaeological and social anthropological interests together. Robin Ridington (University of British Columbia) challenged this view of technology, both in discussion and in his own paper, given later in the symbolism session. He defined "technology" as an aspect of knowledge, "based on the possession of artifice rather than artifacts." Session 2 dealt with property rights and conflict and generated many more debates over definition. Nicolas Peterson (Australian National University) stressed demands and obligations to "share." Ingold challenged this in discussion, saying that what Peterson was talking about was not sharing at all but "tolerated scrounging" as described by primatologists in studies of chimpanzees. Taking up this point, Fred Myers (New York University) claimed that Peterson's paper was actually about "exchange," and in his own paper on the Pintupi he argued that exchange is a more complex notion than is connoted by the simplistic (and implicitly ethnocentric) phrase "property rights." Ian Keen (University of Queensland) and Howard Morphy (University of Oxford) explored the relations between ideology and religious property in their papers on the Yolungu, and no doubt this theme will be taken up again when the Fifth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies meets in Australia in I988.4 Of the nonAustralianist papers in the session, that of Richard Lee (University of Toronto) was also of potentially seminal interest.5 Reflecting on primitive communism, he urged a return to that concept, if not that life-style, as a key to understanding the present and future condition of mankind. Distinguishing sharply between primitive and rev