Susanna Trnka

Competing Responsibilities: Moving Beyond Neoliberal Responsibilisation

Ideas of responsibility pervade social life, underpinning forms of governance, subjectivities, and collective relations. Inspired by current analyses of neoliberal projects of ‘responsibilisation’, this paper examines modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or co-exist with neoliberal ideals. Our aim is twofold: first, we wish to broaden current scholarly understandings of how neoliberal ‘responsible’ subjects are nested within multiple frames of dependencies, reciprocities, and obligations. Secondly, we articulate a framework for conceptualising responsibility that places responsibilisation alongside relations of care and social contract ideologies—three modes of inter-relationship that we see as underlying the ‘competing responsibilities’ inherent in contemporary social life.

Introduction: Competing Responsibilities: Reckoning Personal Responsibility, Care for the Other, and the Social Contract in Contemporary Life

Calls to be responsible pervade contemporary life.1 In many Western countries, the drive for responsibility is often portrayed as being at the heart of public and political institutions. Governments around the world regularly list one of their main priorities as responsibly managing national finances; large multinational corporations increasingly promote their efforts to be socially and environmentally responsible and responsive; and in many workplaces, employees are increasingly being responsibilized through new modes of audit and assessment. Every day we hear myriad different appeals to responsibility, demanding that people must be held accountable for personal failings, social ills, and accomplishments. In the global arena, responsibility and its absence are often cast as the crux of conflict and its resolution. Responsibility is an ideal, it seems, we can never have too much of; calls for responsibility frequently index a lack, an aspiration, an achievement, or an obligation that is hard to refute. The increasing pervasiveness of responsibility in contemporary discourse, and often the lack of reflexivity about its inherent social worth, are precisely what necessitates a closer examination of this concept. The task of unpack-

Domestic experiments: familial regimes of coping with childhood asthma in New Zealand.

In this article, I examine the self-positioning of many New Zealand mothers of children with asthma as parent-experts whose authority supersedes that of implementing the self-management strategies advocated by medical professionals. In a socio-political context that emphasizes neoliberal values of autonomy and self-responsibility, these parent-experts experiment with a variety of pharmaceutical regimes, determining familial modes of care that privilege the achievement of what they consider to be ‘normal childhoods.’ While some families accept asthma as a chronic condition and encourage children to adopt standardized, daily preventative regimes, others craft alternative strategies of pharmaceutical use that allow them to experientially maintain asthma as a sporadic and temporary, if frequent and sometimes dramatic, interruption of everyday life. Childhood asthma care practices are thus not only vested in kinship networks, but often arise out of familial-based experiments whose goal is to determine regimes that enable the preservation of ‘normality.’

Cleanliness in a Caste-less Context: Collective Negotiations of Purity and Pollution among Indo-Fijian Hindus

Despite the near elimination of caste in Fiji, Indo-Fijian Hindus widely adhere to pollution ideologies that were once associated with caste hierarchies. In this paper, I analyse how such ideologies have been transformed from demarcating caste status to indexing Hindu identity. Examining a hotly contested community debate that took place when members of a Hindu devotional singing group in Fiji were accused of praying while being ‘unclean’, I argue that the intense local interest incited by such allegations—along with highly creative acts of adherence that many Indo-Fijian women undertake to avoid similar accusations—can illuminate largely unexamined aspects of how women collectively comply with pollution prohibitions, while simultaneously investing them with further social and moral force.

Social group dynamics predict stress variability among children in a New Zealand classroom

Previous research proposes stress as a mechanism for linking social environments and biological bodies. In particular, non-human primate studies investigate relationships between cortisol as a measure of stress response and social hierarchies. Because human social structures often include hierarchies of dominance and social status, humans may exhibit similar patterns. Studies of non-human primates, however, have not reached consistent conclusions with respect to relationships between social position and levels of cortisol. While human studies report associations between cortisol and various aspects of social environments, studies that consider social status as a predictor of stress response also report mixed results. Others have argued that perceptions of social status may have different implications for stress response depending upon social context. We propose here that characteristics of childrens social networks may be a better predictor of central tendencies and variability of stress response than their perceptions of social status. This is evaluated among 24 children from 9.4 to 11.3 years of age in one upper middle-class New Zealand primary school classroom, assessed through observation within the classroom, self-reports during semi-structured interviews and 221 serial saliva samples provided daily over 10 consecutive school days. A synthetic assessment of the childrens networks and peer-relationships was developed prior to saliva-cortisol analysis. We found that greater stability of peer-relationships within groups significantly predicts lower within-group variation in mid-morning cortisol over the two-week period, but not overall within-group differences in mean cortisol.

Pollution and Intimacy in a Transcendent Ethics of Care: A Case of Aged-care in India

ABSTRACT In India, where children’s care of ageing parents is seen as practical and sacred, animated by notions of seva (selfless service), the outsourcing of elder care causes considerable concern. Meanwhile, carers’ work in old-age homes is treated as transactional, and their moral claims about this work are either overlooked or criticised. While gendered, socio-economic circumstances compel the women we discuss in this paper to care-work at an old-age home in Pune, they also understood this work as a register for the spiritual striving normally reserved for higher classes and castes. Accordingly, notions of polluting and non-polluting bodily waste inform the sense of kin-like intimacy through which they frame their labour. Attending to the institutional, spiritual, emotional and bodily registers of these carers’ work, we argue for a transcendent ethics of care, a conceptualisation that contributes to broader understandings of marginalisation and moral imagination in an ordinary ethics of care.

Peripheral vision as anthropological critique: How perspectives from the margins can illuminate the exploits of twenty-first-century global capitalism

In the context of rapid neoliberal reform, both anthropology as a discipline and the social and cultural phenomena it studies are undergoing profound changes. In this article we develop June Nashs concept of “peripheral vision” to show how peripheries, and the politics of “peripheralization”, can illuminate processes of neoliberalization and the implications that this has for anthropological knowledge production. We argue that anthropology is uniquely situated to examine the conceptual blind spots produced by capitalism. By recasting “peripheral vision” as an analytic concept and methodological tool, we show how cultivating our ethnographic sensibilities to identify and hone in on events and processes that lie beyond our immediate field of vision can provide a useful antidote to the seductive fantasies of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, we also suggest how this approach can help counter some of the increasing strictures on knowledge production and narrowing of the research imagination that neoliberal reforms impose.

Playing cowboys and Indians: the therapeutics of nostalgia

The term nostalgia was initially coined to describe a newly recognized form of homesickness so acute it was considered often fatal. Over time, the medicalized origins of nostalgia have disappeared and it would be unthinkable today to find medical professionals diagnosing patients with this condition. Nonetheless, contemporary usage of the term continues to reverberate with negative overtones, often suggesting suffering, melancholy or loss. This article presents a counter-case of nostalgia, considering the possibilities of nostalgia as a mode of therapeutics. Focusing on Czech trampers’ re-enactments of the imagined environments, personas, and activities of the American “Wild West”, the author argues that Czechs’ nostalgic re-enactments of so-called “Indian” or “cowboy” ways of life open up an imaginative horizon conducive to promoting physical and mental well-being. Much like drama therapy, these enactments enable participants to momentarily embody foreign personas and experiment with forms of masculinity and relations to nature that might otherwise be foreclosed to them. Such acts of nostalgic play are indicative, the author argues, not of an unhealthy detachment from the present but of an agentive and highly creative means of using imagined pasts to recast one’s sense of self in the present and future.

An Anthropological Trompe l'Oeil for a Common World: An Essay on the Economy of Knowledge

Diana Eades has also shown with reference to requests for information. Circumspection is also evident in the practice of ‘broadcast talk’. Garde concludes that there is a general preference for the implicit in Bininj-Gunwok communication ‘as a formal verbal art’ (255). As is all too common in academic publishing, the book is marred by poor copyediting. Nevertheless, what makes the work outstanding is its intensity of focus on a particular range of related features of linguistic communication among Bininj Gunwok speakers, while exploring that range in extraordinary depth. It nicely relates local particulars to broader theoretical concerns, and will help to illuminate similar phenomena in other languages and cultures.