Kath Weston

Political Ecologies of the Precarious

Soon after debates about post-Fordism drew attention to the precariousness of employment under new labor regimes, a sense of precarity entered ecological discourse through depictions of climate change that made the hold of life on earth appear increasingly tenuous. Political ecologies of the precarious incorporate an affective stance that allows people to live with apparent contradictions, reassuring them that they can poison the world without limit even as they recognize that a limit must be out there somewhere and suturing them to ecological demise even as they work against it. Through a series of ethnographic “stopgaps” set in Chicago, New Delhi, and Venice, this essay examines the part played by Henry Ford’s iconic product, the automobile, in cultivating this affective stance by bringing “the masses” into an intimate, visceral engagement with the products of synthetic chemistry. The story of how the car became a leading protagonist in quest narratives of the path to sustainability suggests ways to reinvent such affective intimacies by organizing the world into something other than a collection of resources waiting to be managed.

The Lady Vanishes: On Never Knowing, Quite, Who Is a Lesbian

Researchers, like political contestants, have to engage matters of epistemology to frame their claims and their debates. In that sense the emerging consensus between lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) advocates and their political adversaries that it is impossible to recognize lesbians by sight, much less indexically gendered features, is instructive. This article reviews a range of methodological research strategies designed to grapple with the complexities of determining who counts as “lesbian” in different contexts. Those classificatory strategies include working definitions, self-definition, identification of “bias,” interpretive embrace of slippery categories, and turning the process of classification into an object of study. After exploring the strengths and shortcomings of each approach, the article argues for a calculus of belonging based on the concept of limit rather than a politics of demarcation.

Lifeblood, liquidity, and cash transfusions: beyond metaphor in the cultural study of finance

During the global financial crisis of 2008, descriptions of the crisis and remedies advanced to address it were suffused with references to blood. Metaphors such as lifeblood, liquidity, blood pressure, cardiac arrest, and transfusion were linked and elaborated into organic analogies of cash/credit ‘flow’ predicated on the conception of a body animated by a closed circulatory system. Attention to the once controversial claims associated with William Harveys seventeenth-century ‘discovery’ of blood circulation can help denaturalize this usage of circulation and demonstrate how organic economic analogies have informed policy recommendations, not always to best effect. The essay concludes by introducing the concept of meta-materiality to explain why the anthropology of finance must go beyond metaphorical readings of economic discourse if it hopes to understand phenomena such as the literal uses of blood in political protest and the accelerated commodification of blood donation in response to the crisis.

Lifeblood, liquidity, and cash transfusions: beyond metaphor in the cultural study of finance: Lifeblood, liquidity, and cash transfusions

During the global financial crisis of 2008, descriptions of the crisis and remedies advanced to address it were suffused with references to blood. Metaphors such as lifeblood, liquidity, blood pressure, cardiac arrest, and transfusion were linked and elaborated into organic analogies of cash/credit ‘flow’ predicated on the conception of a body animated by a closed circulatory system. Attention to the once controversial claims associated with William Harveys seventeenth-century ‘discovery’ of blood circulation can help denaturalize this usage of circulation and demonstrate how organic economic analogies have informed policy recommendations, not always to best effect. The essay concludes by introducing the concept of meta-materiality to explain why the anthropology of finance must go beyond metaphorical readings of economic discourse if it hopes to understand phenomena such as the literal uses of blood in political protest and the accelerated commodification of blood donation in response to the crisis.