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On Juneteenth, Friday, June 19, 2020, unionized workers of the Durham Workers Assembly of Durham, North Carolina, held a rally in front of Durham Police Headquarters to "defund the police" in support of the national Black Lives Matter movement protesting in massive numbers in the streets of US cities and being met with overwhelming police repression Black Lives Matter marches in the streets of cities and towns of the United States continued, as the world looked on [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Focaal is the property of Berghahn Books and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

This is a deeply important book for all scholars of China, and it is a timely one as well. It is timely in a number of ways that in 2019 not even the author (nor any of us) could have foreseen. Sin...

This article theorizes the making and unmaking of the urban housing commons in Amsterdam. The article reviews the literature on the urban housing commons, sets out the analytics of use values and exchange values for housing, and situates these analytics within the transition from dominance of industrial to finance capital in the Netherlands during neoliberalization from the mid-1970s to the present. A vibrant housing commons in Amsterdam came into existence by the 1980s because of two social movements that pressed the Dutch state to institutionalize this commons—the New Left movement within the Dutch Labor Party, and the squatters’ movement in Amsterdam. The subsequent shift in dominance from industrial to finance capital has led to the decline of both movements and the erosion of the housing commons.

This module for Involving Anthropology presents an account of one of the plenary debates held at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) World Congress held at Manchester University, 5-10 August 2013. The module begins with a brief introduction to provide the context for the debate, which included two speakers for (Amita Baviskar and Don Nonini) and two speakers against (Helen Kopnina and Veronica Strang) the motion: ‘Justice for people must come before justice for the environment’. The introduction is followed by an edited transcript of John Gledhill’s welcome and introduction, the texts of the arguments made by each speaker for and against the motion (with the exception of Veronica Strang, whose presentation is being published elsewhere a summary of the comments and questions subsequently invited from the floor of the hall, and then a transcript of the responses of the presenters.

This article proposes that the Emergency counterinsurgency campaign of the British colonial state should be viewed as a conjunctural episode of dispossession of Malayan laboring people. Conjunctural episodes of dispossession of working people through state violence and racialized rhetoric emerge as a response to crises in capitalist accumulation occurring at multiple and overlapping scales of capitalist systems – the imperial, the national/colonial, and the local/regional. During these episodes state and capitalist strategies destroy political organizations and solidarities among laboring people and demoralize them over long periods of time, through processes simultaneously material and semiotic. Employing new theorizations of the global anthropology of labor, this article first examines the postwar and Emergency years when the multiethnic and industry-wide bases of Malayan trade unions were destroyed while an estimated half a million working people were forcibly concentrated in so-called New Vil...

Today's wrenching worldwide social and cultural instability calls for more adequate theorization. Through an examination of the local-food movement in the United States, I consider one such theorization, Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman's anthropology of global systems. The Friedmans set out an original conceptualization of transformations in the political economy of commercial civilizations and processes of identity formation in periods of hegemonic decline. I present data on the local-food movement in North Carolina and on differences in identity orientations between “sustainable-agriculture” and “food-security” activists to evaluate this conceptualization.

Contemporary China has recently been seen as in the throes of `neoliberal restructuring'. This claim is contested on theoretical and methodological grounds. During the period of economic liberalization since the death of Mao, China has shown a hybrid governance that has combined earlier Maoist socialist, nationalist and developmentalist practices and discourses of the Communist Party with the more recent market logic of `market socialism'. A new cadre-capitalist class has emerged during liberalization, while large numbers of farmers, urban workers and a `floating population' of urban migrants have been dispossessed of land, employment and political rights. Reactions by many higher-level Party cadres against dispossession show a residual commitment to socialist values. Guanxi personalist ties within the new cadre-capitalist class simultaneously blur the `state'/`market' boundary, lead to dispossession and create conditions for accelerated capitalist growth. The conclusion is that contemporary China is not becoming `neoliberal' in either a strong or weak sense, nor undergoing a process of neoliberalization, but instead shows the emergence of an oligarchic corporate state and Party whose legitimacy is being challenged by disenfranchised classes, but is still in control through its efforts at modernization.

It is always a pleasure to read John Clarke’s work because, like the analytical “ordinary language” philosophers of the 1950s to 1970s, such as Wittgenstein and Austin, he pushes all of us who use the concepts he examines to think more rigorously about what we mean by them and by our theoretical assumptions when we use them. The present essay is no exception, and I learned much from it as a tour d’horizon of current thinking about neo-liberalism by social scientists. The observations that John makes about the ways in which current scholars view neo-liberalism as promiscuous, omnipresent, and omnipotent are spot-on. Unfortunately, unlike the ordinary language philosophers, John has examined neo-liberalism worldwide without sufficient attention to examples in specific places and times to help us perceptively think through what is going on. Perhaps it is the empiricist in me coming out, but I feel that the world is a far too heterogeneous place to think about without disciplining our theoretical concepts through specific applications to cases that may illuminate their limitations. I am sure that John shares this sentiment with me, but the problem in this essay is that in it John thinks in general about the virtues of thinking specifically through examples (with, as he points out, all the contradictions, tensions, and stresses they bring up), but the result is that he still ends up thinking only in general, and this at times compounds confusions rather than illuminates them. This leads to my first point. One can’t think through what neo-liberalism is, until and unless one has thought through what it is not. This is a crucial diacritical exercise. What societies do not show neo-liberal characteristics, what are the configurations of political cultures, governing logic, and class rule that coexist with neoliberalism but are not dominated by it? John of course is well aware of this, but I do not think he has adequately confronted its implications. For example, John quite correctly asks us to think of neo-liberalism as open, unfinished, rife with contradictions, tensions, and ambivalences, because he says this “announces the possibility of thinking about what is not neo-liberal ... and thus the possibility of living without neo-liberalism” (p. 145). But one should beware of what one wishes for. Despite some progressive alternatives, I can also think of several past and contemporary examples of non–neo-liberal forms of governance that are hardly desirable (e.g., fascism, predatory oligarchy, regional mafias), as long as one is willing to argue, as I am, that neo-liberalism is not omnipotent, and does not (contra Bondi and Laurie 2005) affect, much less infect, all spaces in the world. Moreover, one must be able to say that there are places that

This essay argues that grounded utopian movements (GUMs) have generally been overlooked in recent cross-disciplinary theorizations of social movements, and seeks to rectify the neglect. GUMs, unlike other social movements, do not seek recognition either from capitalist institutions or modern nationstates, but are instead grounded in visions of alternative "ideal places" (utopias), and set out to establish alternative ways of living which their members find more just and satisfying than at present. We discuss the Ghost Dance of the Great Plains, the Rastafari movement of the Caribbean, and the long-duree Maya movement as grounded utopian movements of the periphery, to illustrate major aspects of theoretical, epistemological, and methodological approaches to the study of GUMs. We conclude with a brief treatment of the global justice movement as a contemporary GUM.

Chinese owners of Malaysian truck transport firms characterized Chinese drivers in 1979-80 labor disputes as "disputatious," "cheating," and making "rice-eating money." They presented themselves as a stigmatized, besieged, ethnic-trading minority. My later fieldwork from 1985-92 revealed that drivers used an embodied pedagogy of learning through labor to critique owners' accounts and their own exploitation, even though as "crude" men they shared with "mannered" owners male-specific mobilities vis-a-vis Chinese women. Reflections on these fieldwork findings challenge prevailing discursive and post-Marxist turns within ethnography. [diaspora Chinese, Southeast Asia, strategic totalization, embodied pedagogies, class analysis, gender, ethnic politics]

In this chapter I seek to place the situation of transnational labor migrants within a broader comparative class framework than they are often viewed by examining not only the conditions they face, but also the situations confronting migrants belonging to classes diff erent from the working classwhether owners of petty productive property, professionals, or managers and owners of capitalist fi rms.1 My approach is to examine how persons moving transnationally mediate the relationship between two aspects of life in contemporary capitalist societies-capitalist processes of value production, including the operation of circuits of fi nance and rentier capital, and the processes of social reproduction which make possible the reproduction of the labor process of capitalist production, the continuity of the capital/labor relation, and beyond these processes as such, the reproduction of the conditions of everyday life in capitalist societies. Let us take these two aspects in turn.

Marilyn Strathern, in her collection of essays, Commons and Borderlands (2004: 39-40), reflects on interdisciplinary research collaboration and its products in the contemporary British university setting. She points to two opposed pres sures on such research. One, seeking "undivided outcomes," comes from those engaged in interdisciplinary research who see "an object held in common, the joint product, multi-authored, of diverse efforts." The other comes from those determined to attribute "ownership" as a matter of "undivided origins" to an individual "owner" of the object—its presumed creator—who can be uniquely identified and appropriately awarded, often with legal intellectual property rights in the form of patents or copyrights. While the perspective of researchers connected to the former impetus is one in which several researchers see them selves as bringing their complementary knowledges to bear in an "orientation to a joint project ('problem solving', etc.) [which] takes precedence" (ibid.: 48n4), that of the latter requires that they parse out origins to specify how "col laboration can be unpicked to identify the individual person, or the individual team, with whom the origin rests undivided" (ibid.: 40). Both pressures are, in the case of the British academy, very recent. Calls for interdisciplinary research have been articulated over the same period of the past two decades during which new property claims have been made—by universities, by 'society', and by for-profit corporations—on intellectual creations in the university milieu. Strathern asks us to consider how complexly and tensely constituted such pro cesses of intellectual authorship are by thinking about the concept of 'the com mons'. This is to think "on images of freely available circulation of knowledge for all, notwithstanding the fact that there is never any terra nullus, that inventions are always in part re-invention, and thus always someone else's as well. Yet they may require novel forms of expression. Discovery and inventions (in the sense