John Gledhill

The Anthropology of Europe: identity and boundaries in conflict

This is one of the first anthropological studies of Europe post-1989. Fourteen authors examine the social, cultural and political implications of European integration with particular emphasis on changing European identities, concepts of citizenship and levels of participation. Their aim is to set an agenda for future research based on European identity as a new object of study. The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with major theoretical issues that have characterized the anthropological study of Europe and includes a discussion of the usefulness of the Mediterranean as a cultural area. The second section develops these themes further using different theoretical perspectives to explain complex issues such as nationalism, ethnic identities, and sectarian conflicts. Nine case studies cover a wide range of contemporary topics including Irish nationalism, identity and conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and gender, support and child care provision in Spain. This book aims to fill a gap in the literature on European integration and should be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as students of sociology, social anthropology, political science, communications and European studies.This is one of the first anthropological studies of Europe post-1989. Fourteen authors examine the social, cultural and political implications of European integration with particular emphasis on changing European identities, concepts of citizenship and levels of participation. Their aim is to set an agenda for future research based on European identity as a new object of study. The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with major theoretical issues that have characterized the anthropological study of Europe and includes a discussion of the usefulness of the Mediterranean as a cultural area. The second section develops these themes further using different theoretical perspectives to explain complex issues such as nationalism, ethnic identities, and sectarian conflicts. Nine case studies cover a wide range of contemporary topics including Irish nationalism, identity and conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and gender, support and child care provision in Spain. This book aims to fill a gap in the literature on European integration and should be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as students of sociology, social anthropology, political science, communications and European studies.

The Mexican Contribution to Restructuring US Capitalism NAFTA as an instrument of flexible accumulation

■ This article analyzes the history of Mexico-US migration in relation to the contemporary social impacts of labor market restructuring, relocation of production, and global lifestyle and real estate investments in the transnational space defined by NAFTA. Mexico is not simply a supplier of cheap labor that enables US capital to confront globalization. Economics is entangled in politics and a specific history of racialized labor markets, neocolonialism and nation- state construction. The sectors of Mexican capital that benefit from NAFTA are as mobile as US capital and integrated with it, whilst segmentation of the migrant population has been exacerbated by the changes of the past two decades. Multiple contradictions are transforming economic, social and politi cal life throughout the NAFTA region, but although the social consequences of neoliberalism have diminished Mexicos governability, the key issue is whether local social movements and transnational coalitions can modify this regime of accumulation.

Some Histories are More Possible than Others: Structural Power, Big Pictures and the Goal of Explanation in the Anthropology of Eric Wolf

While there are elements of postmodernist and post-structuralist thought that Wolf either anticipated or incorporated happily into his own thinking, his realist epistemology remained radically opposed to the fashions that became dominant after the publication of Europe and the People without History. He insisted that the goal of a humanistic science was to explain rather than simply to interpret ‘experience-near’ phenomena, and that explanation was a viable goal provided anthropologists adopted agreed canons for formulating concepts and undertaking comparisons. He also saw the quest for explanation as a cumulative process, in which new developments incorporated insights from the past. This article argues that Wolf’s particular way of marrying historical and ethnographic research enabled him to produce an understanding of the development of the modern world that is quite different from the grand narratives that postmodernists reject but still enables us to grasp the ‘bigger picture’ of global history as movement and the force of structural power in local scenarios. Postmodernist and postcolonial theorizing has, in contrast, failed to grasp the historical conditions of its own production and the way our world has changed, offering social and political critiques readily defused or appropriated by today’s more ‘decentred’ hegemonic forces.

The Enron Scandal

From the 1990s until the fall of 2001, Enron was famous throughout the business world and was known as an innovator, technology powerhouse, and a corporation with no fear. The sudden fall of Enron in the end of 2001 shattered not just the business world but also the lives of their employees and the people who believed that their soar to greatness was genuine. Their collapse was followed by a series of revelations on how they manipulated their success.

Power in political anthropology

This paper reviews the development of anthropological studies of power since the 1970s. It relates anthropological work to broader trends in the social sciences, such as the pervasive influence of Foucauldian perspectives, whilst emphasising what is distinctive in anthropological approaches and contributions to wider debates. The evolution of the field is related to the broadening of anthropologys objects of study, to its questioning of Eurocentric assumptions, to its ethnographic focus on social relations, practices and the materiality of power, and to critiques that emphasize the need to capture all the politics that are embedded in the situations that anthropologists study.

Indigenous Autonomy, Delinquent States, and the Limits of Resistance

This paper focuses on struggles by Mexican indigenous communities to defend their patrimony and guarantee their own security in an environment dominated by the parallel power of organized crime, paramilitary violence, impunity, and a neo-extractivist economy. After reviewing the relationships between the radicalization of indigenous autonomy demands and transformations of the Mexican state, analysis focuses on recent developments involving a Nahua community on the Pacific coast of Michoacán state that has a long history of successful defence of its communal lands, alongside a Purépecha community in the central highlands that has been its longstanding ally. The violence of external actors reflects the penetration of all levels of government by organized crime, but violence is not a new historical experience in this region. What has changed is that the capacity of these communities to resist has been affected by their internal disarticulation by the same forces.

INTRODUCTION: ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON INDIGENOUS RESURGENCE IN CHIAPAS

This introduction places the papers in this collection within the context of research on Chiapas since the 1994 rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and Chiapas itself into the longer-term national scenario of indigenous politics in Mexico, showing how these historically and ethnographically grounded studies contribute not only to understanding developments in Mexico and Chiapas but also to anthropological analyses of the relationships between states and regional social movements in general. Although the collection sheds new light on the EZLN itself, by advancing the ethnography of the political life of the communities in which it operates and the ethnography of the movement itself as an organization, it also serves to ‘decenter’ the EZLN in the anthropology of Chiapas, thereby strengthening broader perspectives on indigenous assertiveness in southern Mexico. Exploring a variety of different forms of indigenous responses to a changing world and a changing state, the papers not only chart the variation that exists within and between indigenous communities themselves but also show ‘the state’ itself to be far less coherent and unitary than it is often painted in activist accounts.

The Enron Scandal: Global Corporatism against Society

From the 1990s until the fall of 2001, Enron was famous throughout the business world and was known as an innovator, technology powerhouse, and a corporation with no fear. The sudden fall of Enron in the end of 2001 shattered not just the business world but also the lives of their employees and the people who believed that their soar to greatness was genuine. Their collapse was followed by a series of revelations on how they manipulated their success.

Deromanticizing Subalterns or Recolonizing Anthropology? Denial of Indigenous Agency and Reproduction of Northern Hegemony in the work of David Stoll

This paper builds on some of the critical points made in the final section of Leigh Binfords discussion. David Stolls critique of Rigoberta Menchú Tum is not simply an attack on the truthfulness of an indigenous woman who has become a major political figure. Stolls larger agenda is an assault, not only on a number of other anthropologists, but on accounts of Latin American history that honor grassroots strivings for rights and social justice, and on political arguments offered by cultural studies and post‐colonial criticism. His book resonates with parallel attacks from other, and diverse, quarters, while also embodying a range of vices as an anthropological analysis (Stoll 1999).

New Actors, New Political Spaces, Same Divided City? Reflections on Poverty and the Politics of Urban Development in Salvador, Bahia

Critics of Lula’s administration argue that business has greatest weight in setting its priorities and that anti-poverty programmes based on conditional cash transfers have little long-term structural impact on social inequality. Yet the coherence and scope of these programmes is now an order of magnitude greater than under the previous administration, their impact on poverty has so far proved sustainable, and poor people themselves often express satisfaction with them. This paper argues that critics who see retreat from universal social benefits as undermining political commitment to reducing social inequality underestimate the countervailing force of the capacity of some poor communities to seize the opportunities that have emerged to oblige politicians to reengage with both poverty and the roots of social injustice. Analyses that focus solely on economic precariousness and the decline of sociability are ignoring the ways in which third sector activity and social change have produced new kinds of political actors and group identities, particularly amongst young people, that may be ambivalent in nature but indicate that levels of politicisation are not being reduced. Nevertheless, optimism about poverty reduction needs to be tempered by appreciation of how problems of violence and insecurity also shape state interventions in, and in some cases virtual withdrawal from, poor communities. The rationality of party politics may have a more negative effect on securing the longer-term patterns of public investment required to reduce social inequality than it has had on the administration of the Bolsa Familia programme. In the case of Salvador, Bahia, where urban real estate interests remain as politically influential as ever, change will depend on the strength of pressures from above and below on municipal and state governments, but although anti-poverty programmes help keep people invested in the political system, they can also increase aspirations for greater economic and racial equality.