u n i ve r s i t y o f co pe n h ag e n

After dispossession

ethnographic approaches to neoliberalization

Salemink, Oscar; Rasmussen, Mattias Borg

Published in:Focaal

DOI:10.3167/fcl.2016.740101

Publication date:2016

Document versionEarly version, also known as pre-print

Citation for published version (APA):Salemink, O., & Rasmussen, M. B. (2016). After dispossession: ethnographic approaches to neoliberalization.Focaal, 2016(74), 3-12. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2016.740101

Download date: 25. mar.. 2022

This is the author’s postprint version of an article in Focaal, vol. 2016, no. 74, pp. 3-

12. The authoritative version can be found here:

https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2016.740101

The present research benefitted from funding from the European Research Council

(ERC). ERC Grant: State Formation Through the Local Production of Property and

Citizenship (Ares (2015)2785650 – ERC-2014-AdG – 662770-Local State).

After dispossession

Ethnographic approaches to neoliberalization

Oscar Salemink and Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Abstract: Since the 1980s globalization has taken on increasingly neoliberalizing forms in the

form of commoditization of objects, resources, or even human bodies, their reduction to

financial values, and their enclosure or other forms of dispossession. “After dispossession”

provides ethnographic accounts of the diverse ways to deal with dispossessions by attempts at

repossessing values in connection to what has been lost in neoliberal assemblages of people

and resources and thus how material loss might be compensated for in terms of subjective

experiences of restoring value beyond the financial. The analytical challenge we pursue is one

of bridging between a political economy concerned with the uneven distribution of wealth and

resources, and the profound changes in identity politics and subject formation that are

connected to these. We therefore argue that any dispossession may trigger acts of repossession

of values beyond the financial realm, and consequently that suffering, too, entails forms of

agency predicated on altered subjectivities. This move beyond the suffering subject reconnects

the study of subjectivities with the analysis of alienation, disempowerment, and

impoverishment through dispossession and attempts at recapturing value in altered

circumstances.

Keywords: dispossession, identity politics, neoliberalization, political economy,

subjectivity

This collection of articles addresses the question of how unequal social relations materialize

and become part of the everyday in very different settings, in the form of dispossession and

disenfranchisement on the global margins. More specifically, the articles seek to offer

ethnographic insight into what happens after dispossessions of resources, bodies, and human

agency in neoliberalized contexts. In The new imperialism, David Harvey (2005: 145–152)

argued that dispossession itself is nothing new (and hence not necessarily neoliberal), as it had

already been described by Marx in terms of “enclosures of commons” and “primitive

accumulation,” which in his view preceded capitalist accumulation by the exploitation of “free”

labor. However, with the imposition of commoditized forms and financial values in all spheres

of life, accumulation is no longer exclusively associated with capitalist production as

accumulation by dispossession takes place beyond capitalist production itself.

Since the 1980s globalization has taken on increasingly neoliberalizing forms in the

form of commoditization of objects, resources, or even human bodies, their reduction to

financial values, and their enclosure or other forms of dispossession. Neoliberalism entails

processes of commoditization exploding into virtually all spheres of life, resulting in a

financialization of all sorts of different values and in their consequent dispossession. While

these processes follow a global logic, the encounters that are the subject of the analyses in the

following articles always take place locally. In this theme section a number of processes and

connections, scales, and categories intersect: subjects and objects, local and global scales, and

historical processes and subjective experiences are all connected to a redefinition, repackaging,

and transformation of a variety of dispossessions that people around the world experience.

“After dispossession” provides ethnographic accounts of the diverse ways to deal with

dispossessions by attempts at repossessing values in connection to what has been lost in

neoliberal assemblages of people and resources and thus how material loss might be

compensated for in terms of subjective experiences of restoring value beyond the financial.

The materials, resources, and bodies that are commoditized and financialized are not

simply “things” but often have ontological dimensions in the sense that they identify and define

and categorize persons, connect them with others, map them onto locations, and inscribe them

into localized histories—thus producing localities (Appadurai 1995). Joel Robbins (2013)

argues that an obsession with identities and identity politics over the last couple of decades

coincided with an anthropological infatuation with the “suffering subject” as substitution for

the “savage slot” as the main object that constitutes the anthropological discipline.

Differentiated along ethnicity, gender, sexuality, caste, or race lines, “suffering subjects” have

largely been understood in postcolonial (Said 1979, 1993; Chakrabarty 2000), postsocialist

(Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Hann 2003a, 2003b), postfeminist (McRobbie 2004, 2011), or

postsecular terms (Habermas 2008). While offering valuable insights into the formation and

contestation of subjectivities, the emphasis on identity politics has in academic practice led to

some measure of decontextualization in which political-economic and class considerations, for

example, are largely left out. The analytical challenge is therefore one of bridging between a

political economy concerned with the uneven distribution of wealth and resources, and the

profound changes in identity politics and subject formation that are connected to these. We

therefore contend that any dispossession triggers acts of repossession of values, and

consequently, that suffering, too, entails forms of agency predicated on altered subjectivities.

In a parallel analysis of postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” Fredric

Jameson (1991: 48) writes:

the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of

an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point

at which everything in our social life—from economic value and state power to

practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become

“cultural” in some original and yet untheorized sense.

This points to an interesting paradox: whereas many anthropologists analyze contemporary

culture in terms of its neoliberalization (Strathern 2000; Ventura 2012), Jameson points to a

simultaneous, seeming culturalization of human experience, which is often expressed through

identity politics (see Robbins 2013). To the extent that the various “post” approaches privilege

the study and hence the foregrounding of identity politics, anthropology’s “suffering subject”

has been naturalized.

This anthropological focus on identity politics has had profound effects on the ways in

which we understand existing political-economic inequalities, which are oftentimes

conceptualized in terms of the relation between persons and objects. The analysis of the

accelerated accumulation by dispossession taking place under conditions of neoliberal

capitalism became by and large divorced from the analysis of the constitution of subjects. This

divorce is made conceptually possible by taking a Cartesian subject-object dichotomy in

Western thought for granted. The articles in this collection follow Joel Robbins’s call for

anthropologists to move beyond the suffering subject as the raison d’être of the discipline—

without following him in his call for an “anthropology of the good”—by reconnecting the study

of subjectivities with the analysis of alienation, disempowerment, and impoverishment through

dispossession and attempts at recapturing value in altered circumstances beyond the “post”

implied the various post-approaches.

We do not claim to be unique in this venture. The articles in this collection share an

interest with a growing body of literature concerned with the question of how to combine the

study of intimate space with that of global powers (Smith 2014: 12; Wilson 2012). This is a

program that has been developed over a number of publications (Kalb 1997; Kalb and Tak

2005; Narotzky and Smith 2006), which have all explored how class is being reconfigured and

new surplus populations produced in the wake of neoliberal expansion. Don Kalb (1997, 2005)

suggests the notion of critical junctions to understand different scales of interaction and how it

articulates with another (Smith 2014: 13). We share with Kalb (2015) an ambition to combine

intimate ethnographies with an understanding of larger historical processes. These studies raise

the question of how to combine “the currents of force and tendency” with a “fine grained

attention to everyday experience” (Narotzky and Smith 2006: 3). We do, however, take a

different stance from these studies as we focus on the diverse fields of value that are

simultaneously becoming subject to contestation in the context of neoliberalization within and

beyond the economy.

The articles in this collection are about populations deemed to be redundant within the

capitalist system—so-called surplus populations (Li 2010). Some, but not all, have been

dispossessed economically. We are interested in the kind of dispossession being associated

with being “surplus” rather than the restructuring of, say, class (Carrier and Kalb 2015;

Narotzky and Smith 2006; Barber, Leach, and Lem 2012). By highlighting the complexities of

histories, struggles, and social relations, these studies have shown how the current moment of

capitalist restructuring is producing a range of new social relations. Focusing on

neonationalism in Europe, Kalb and Halmai, for example, argue that “working-class neo-

nationalism is the somewhat traumatic expression of material and cultural experiences of

dispossession and disenfranchisement in the neoliberal epoch” (2011: 1). The point here is that

social relations are being restructured in processes of dispossession referring to “the varied acts

of disorganization, defeat and enclosure that are at once economic, martial, social and cultural”

(Kasmir and Carbonella 2014: 7). While sharing the overall concern of these authors with the

varied impacts of neoliberal restructuring of the economic order, here we are not so much

interested in material economic forms of dispossession as with the “intangible” outcomes of

such processes in terms of altered subjectivities and, consequently, changed forms of agency.

Changing subjectivities

The call to connect the study of changing subjectivities with changing political-economic

circumstance is not unique in anthropology. Peter Worsley’s (1957) analysis of cargo cults as

attempts on the part of Melanesians to appropriate the goods of capitalist modernity (see also

Otto 2010) is an early example of such an approach. In The devil and commodity fetishism in

South America, Michael Taussig (1980) scrutinized the incursion of global capitalism into rural

Colombia and Bolivia, bringing “inexplicable” poverty, misery, and death. He argues that

peoples living on the margins of the world economy interpret money and wealth—after all,

equally inexplicable as their own poverty—as magical and the work of the devil. Other, similar

examples of such metaphysical interpretations of capitalism transcending the subject-object

dichotomy and generating new—often magically or religiously inflected—forms of

subjectivity include the work by Peter Geschiere on the modernity of African witchcraft (1997)

and the seminal work by Jean and John Comaroff on “occult economies” and ‘”millennial

capitalism” (2001). In contemporary Western society, Richard Sennett (1998) analyzed the

personal and psychological effects of contemporary capitalism, while Simon Coleman (2000),

Matthew Engelke (2010), and Daromir Rudnyckyj (2010) discuss the material aspects of

contemporary “prosperity religions” and the ways that they form new subjectivities.

Anthropologists have long held that property involves a relationship between persons

rather than only between persons and things. In their thoughtful introduction to an edited

volume on Ownership and appropriation, Busse and Strang theorize the complex and multiple

connections between ownership, property, and persons against the backdrop of “the rise of

neoliberal ideology and its emphasis on free markets and private property, and the collapse of

socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union” (2011: 2) and “the recent extension

of property rights into the public domain … [as] a process of enclosure” (2011: 10). The latter

insight stems from James Boyle’s critique of the “second enclosure movement” (Boyle 2002:

23) predicated on “our contemporary expansion of intellectual property” (2002: 17) and hence

on “fencing off ideas,” which presupposes the commodification of knowledge through the

enclosure of intellectual and cultural commons (see also Brown 1998).

Busse and Strang seek to denaturalize the seemingly natural categories of personhood

(in liberal ideology usually thought of in individual terms) and property, by complicating our

understanding of the connection between persons and objects through processes of mutual

appropriation: “Like beauty queens, sports stars and spokespersons, such people work hard to

be appropriated and to become icons. The result is a relationship of ‘mutual possession’ with

the social and political entities that they represent … this relationality is at the core of

appropriation” (Busse and Strang 2011: 8).

The point to take home here is that—like property—personhood is relational, and that

relations between persons are oftentimes mediated via objects through processes of

appropriation—“the act of making something one’s own” (Busse and Strang 2011: 4).

Paradoxically, property relations are also conceived of as relations between persons but

disguised as relations between people and things, as many scholars—following Marx—have

observed. Busse and Strang therefore follow Humphrey and Verdery’s (2004) call to “rethink

property in more complex and dynamic terms that do not reify persons, things or relations”

(Busse and Strang 2011: 6).

Property relations

Dis- and repossessions are reconfigurations of the relationship between persons and

collectivities, redefining the material and nonmaterial rights between members of society. As

highlighted by Lund (2011), there is a tight connection between what you can have and who

you can be; new property regimes entail new subjectivities. Changing relations of property in

relation to labor (Nugent 1993); common property and images of community (Li 1996);

territorial property in the context of a colonial history of dispossession and alienation (Van

Meijl 2012); genes and the ways that new biotechnologies expand the ways in which bodies

are valued (Everett 2003); DNA and “whiteness” as property embedded in racial hierarchies

(Reardon and TallBear 2012); and intellectual property and indigeneity (Greene 2004) are

different ways of trying to understand what happens when different notions of property meet

as different kinds of claims over tangible and intangible resources. In these diverse instances,

property relations refer to different appropriating subjects, different appropriated objects, and

different types of connections between these two categories. As bodies, genes, territories, and

even culture become commoditized, objectification occurs (cf. Sharp 2000: 293), and networks

are cut in new ways (Strathern 1996).

Taking their point of departure from these seminal theories that marry the study of

subjects and subjectivities with in-depth political-economic analysis, the articles in this

collection take this analysis one step further. The specter of neoliberalization lingers in the

background of the articles through enclosures, dispossessions, financialization, idioms of

accountability, and a pervasive market logic that overturn existing relations of power and

authority at all levels. The articles in this theme section, however, focus on the dynamics of

attempts to recapture values—understood here not as financial but as cultural value, and hence

different from what was lost through dispossession—by seeking to highlight convergences

between structural conditions, collective imaginaries, and individual aspirations. In using the

terms “property” and “possession,” we make the usual distinction between property as a legal

category that refers to specific rights to something, and possession as the actual use or

inhabitation of something. This could mean, for instance, that dispossession can take place in

situations where property rights are claimed over things that might have been in possession

without legal property rights; in such situations, appropriation inevitably means dispossession.

Dispossessions of land and resources, of bodies, of political agency and sociality, even

of humanity (cf. Agamben 1998), entail a reconfiguration of the relationship between objects

and subjects. Consequently, new subjectivities emerge as the dispossessed, commoditized, and

individualized subjects craft new relations with the objects that were alienated from them,

which are transformed and repackaged in the process, as well as with the agents of

dispossession: corporations, state agencies, clinics. This view questions a scholarly narrative

that links neoliberalization, commoditization, and loss by suggesting that neoliberalism in its

various guises may open up new spaces for other forms of appropriation, or appropriations of

other values or properties, for those deemed redundant in the capitalist market logic. But how

may we understand these spaces? To answer this question, we seek to understand how a number

of connections converge: the connections between subjects and objects; the connections

between “local” and “global”; and consequently, the redefinition, transformation, and

repackaging of the objects and values that are dis- and repossessed.

What comes next?

Central to these articles is therefore not the act of dispossession itself, often vividly described

in the literature, but what comes next. How do people under different circumstances deal with

new property relationships? How are new forms and relations of possession and appropriation

connected up with lived experience and identity formation? What kinds of inequalities are

enacted in the process? Which new alienations, objectifications, appropriations, and

fetishizations come into being as bodies, objects, territories, and (social) life itself are being

commoditized? Through the idioms of dispossession and repossession of values, we wish to

highlight how people not only resist but engage in a new politics of belonging as their place

within their own world and their place in the worlds of others are being reconfigured.

Not dwelling on the act of dispossession itself but rather on what comes next, we seek

to illuminate relationships between subjects and objects that have been commoditized and lost,

involving a temporality without assuming a fixed, linear, or causal teleology. In this move

beyond the experience of dispossession toward acts of repossessing we therefore attempt to

understand how people under different circumstances deal with the new relationships that

emerge between subjects and objects, subjects and subjects, objects and objects, and the new

ontologies and subjectivities that emerge in that process. The approach of the articles

emphasizes experiences of and beyond loss—after dispossession—which postulates a temporal

connection between past, present, and future in which it may be “post” but certainly not past

neoliberalization. This observation is based on the realization that there is no turning back the

clock, and that relations and appropriations—that in the age of the “second enclosure

movement” largely work through accumulation by dispossession—define and eventually

become the persons involved, as in Busse and Strang’s (2011) example of beauty queens above,

but might trigger attempts at repossession, if only in narrative terms, as claims to human dignity

or to the moral high ground.

The articles in this collection, therefore, seek to grasp peoples’ attempts at repossessing

objects, identities, bodies, and even their bare lives—and thus reconstituting themselves—in

varying commoditized, subaltern, sometimes even muted ways. In widely diverging contexts,

the articles in this collection tell thick ethnographic stories of attempts at repossession of such

commoditized relations after the experience of loss and dispossession. Moving beyond the

“suffering subject,” the articles thus explore the myriad subjective implications that such loss

may have for subjects’ livelihoods and identities. These reconfigured relations of subjects with

other subjects and with significantly signifying, commoditized objects—sometimes their own

bodies—are constitutive of new subjectivities and forms of economic and political agency in

changing national and global contexts.

The articles

The collection consists of four articles, which in different ways show how seemingly global

processes become entangled in local affairs in sub-Saharan Africa, in a former Soviet republic,

and in Latin America. The articles focus on how people mobilize and engage themselves with

new opportunities and constraints that follow these emergent discursive, political, economic,

and cultural formations. Two articles—both set in Peru—deal with “classic” forms of

dispossession, namely of water as resource. In a study set in the northern Peruvian Andes,

Mattias Rasmussen analyzes how a group of marginal peasants mobilized successfully against

a proposed mine that would appropriate and probably pollute a high mountain lake that served

as a water source for downstream peasants. Highlighting emerging tensions between property

regimes in land and water and how these spill into notions of citizenship as connected with

both identity and rights, the article sheds light on the shifting relationship between state, capital,

and rural dwellers of the highlands. In the environmental conflict analyzed here, Rasmussen

argues that violations of environmental rights become connected to questions of citizenship,

thus linking the governance of resources intimately to the governance of people as the deep

grievances held by the local populations toward the central government and its obvious

articulations to business interests became a vehicle for protesting against the appropriation of

the lake.

In urban Arequipa, a very different group of people, namely peri-urban farmers, also

seek to find their place in a changing world. Through an analysis of two infrastructural projects,

Astrid Andersen traces the shifting position of the farmers in the social and political landscape

over the course of seventy years. Economic, demographic, and political tendencies created a

situation in which they have been removed from the center of cultural and productive life in

Arequipa to the margins. Finding themselves at the losing end of history, these peri-urban

farmers make nostalgic claims to ancestry and moral high ground—if they don’t literally sell

out and leave. In this conundrum, Andersen claims that material infrastructures simultaneously

distribute ideas of progress and layers of dispossession, shaping a neoliberal urban ecology.

Farmers struggle to reclaim a position of status through moral and affective reactions and by

attempts to strengthen collective efforts.

Also concerned with attempts to regain the moral high ground on the part of

dispossessed subjects during difficult and unsettling times, Katrine Gotfredsen brings the

readers in touch with postsocialist life experiences in the Republic of Georgia. In contrast with

the two previous articles, the dispossessed in the formerly industrial town of Gori are those

who were deprived of their social status and material benefits in the wake of the dissolution of

the Soviet Union in 1991 and of the so-called Rose Revolution in 2003. They find themselves

lost in a space between a Soviet past and a present marked by market-oriented forms of

accumulation that made some “inexplicably” rich and powerful at times of deindustrialization.

The inexplicable, however, is explained by rumor and conspiracy theories, which restores the

honor of those made redundant in contemporary Georgia. Through a mirroring of the very

political discourse that has dispossessed people of social and political standing, such vernacular

conspiracy theories have the effect of repackaging generational and economic marginality into

a broader framework that is of concern to the wider community, and of reinscribing the

dispossessed into social domains—both local and national.

In the final article about rumors in urban Zambia, Birgitte Bruun provides an intriguing

analysis of transnational medical research that extracts blood and other human substances from

research subjects who (are supposed to) take certain experimental medication. By tracing the

paths of research subjects and medical project volunteers, Bruun shows how research subjects

and project volunteers learn to capitalize on the use of their own bodies for medical research

while simultaneously confronting concerns about Satanism and other occult forces that

circulate among their neighbors and acquaintances in peri-urban Lusaka about the “real” and

clandestine purpose of the extraction of human substances. While navigating rumours of

Satanism in their neighborhoods, the subjects of medical research as well as project volunteers

simultaneously maneuver among emergent scenarios of economic, social, and moral

possibility. This study shows how these subjects of medical research who put their own bodies

at stake, as well as other members of the marginalized communities where they live, seek to

turn ambiguous transnational medical research projects into projects of new possibility.

The articles show different aspects of a global political economy that shapes individual

lives. In the Peruvian cases we see how the interest of specific political-economic elites

supersede the interests of certain groups of people. Thus, for the farmers of Arequipa, their

shifting economic and social position can be traced both to internal demographic dynamics that

over the course of the twentieth century changed Peruvian society from predominantly rural to

majority urban. But their shifting position is also related directly to the new ways that Peru has

been inserted into the global economy, producing agricultural crops grown on a large scale in

the desert areas, thus requiring large amounts of irrigation water. The peasants of the highlands

experience another aspect of Peru’s thorough insertion into international markets, as much of

the economic growth that has been a priority of the national government can be traced back to

extractive enterprises. In the case of Zambia, transnational medical companies and local

researchers merge in their need to create cures, careers, and profits. In Georgia, recent political

developments have changed the nation’s geopolitical engagement with the global political

economy. While the economic logic of dispossession seems more obscure in this case, the ways

in which the people of Gori narrate and make sense of the forces behind the policies that

dispossess them reveal that there is an acute awareness of the unequal global distribution of

wealth and resources.

Neoliberalism has been deliberately vague in its definition, allowing for different

expressions of similar phenomena. As recent debates in Focaal (Clarke 2008; Wilson 2012)

and Social Anthropology (Collier 2012; Peck and Theodore 2012; Wacquant 2012), among

others, have shown, there is a need to move away from statist approaches to “neoliberalism”

as a package of “promiscuity, omnipresence, and omnipotence” (Clarke 2008) and instead need

to try to understand how neoliberalism as a principle for governance works on the ground.

Wacquant (2012: 71) proposes a middle way that conceives neoliberalism—understood as an

articulation of state, market, and citizenship—as both an open-ended, plural, and adaptable

project (neo-Foucauldianism) and yet something that has an institutional core that makes it

recognizable and distinct. However, neoliberalism does not exist in and of itself:

The fact that neoliberalism can only exist in socially embedded form means that

transformative dynamics can never be exclusively assigned to neoliberalism … As an

incomplete historical process, unevenly realized in space, neoliberalism must always

dwell with its others; it may even be necessarily parasitic on other social and state

formations (Peck and Theodore 2012: 183; see also Collier 2012: 191).

In these articles there is a shared understanding of neoliberalism as an economic rationale that

permeates governance, “colonizing the field of value” as Povinelli (2011) would have it.

Highlighting processes of subject formation within an uneven global political economy,

the articles all in their different ways show how people deal with new forms of value being

attached to their surroundings and detached from their lives. From extractivist and booming

Peru to postsocialist Georgia and HIV-AIDS-plagued Zambia we see that people seek to find

new ways of having their perceptions of the good life and social justice heard, against the

backdrop of dispossession and loss. All the articles therefore show how global inequalities are

an integral part of “the local,” debunking the meaningfulness of a dichotomy between local

and global scales as the global is already present in the local. The pairing of a (global) political

economy with (local) subjectivities highlights that these do not exist independently to one

another. Processes of dispossession of livelihoods, environment, social status, and human

bodies as these become commoditized in new ways prompt people to find new ways of making

their place in the world. Looking beyond dispossession as loss means that it is not the end but

rather leads to the creation of a new context with emergent subjectivities “after dispossession.”

Acknowledgments

The papers that form the basis for this collection of articles were first presented at a symposium

on “New global assemblages, new patterns of inequality” at the Department of Anthropology,

University of Copenhagen, in October 2012. We thank the contributors Astrid Andersen,

Birgitte Bruun, and Katrine Gotfredsen, as well as the reviewers and the Focaal editorial board

for their generous comments, thoughts, and ideas.

__________

Oscar Salemink is professor in the anthropology of Asia at the University of Copenhagen and

adjunct professor at the Institute of Religion, Politics, and Society of the Australian Catholic

University (Melbourne). Between 2001 and 2011 he worked at VU University in Amsterdam,

from 2005 as professor of social anthropology. Some book-length publications include

Colonial subjects (1999); Vietnam’s cultural diversity (2001); The ethnography of Vietnam’s

central highlanders (2003); The development of religion, the religion of development (2004);

A world of insecurity: anthropological perspectives on human security (2010); the Routledge

handbook on religions in Asia (2014); Scholarship and engagement in mainland Southeast

Asia (2015); and thematic issues of History and Anthropology (1994), Focaal: European

Journal of Anthropology (2006), and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (2007).

E-mail: o.salemink@anthro.ku.dk

_________

Mattias Borg Rasmussen is assistant professor at the Department of Food and Resource

Economics, University of Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University

of Copenhagen. He has been working on environmental governance, water, climate change,

local-level politics, common property, and citizenship in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca.

Rasmussen is the author of Andean waterways: Resource politics in highland Peru

(University of Washington Press, 2015).

E-mail: mbr@ifro.ku.dk

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1995. The production of locality. In Richard Fardon, ed., Counterworks:

Managing the diversity of knowledge, pp. 204–225.

Barber, Pauline G., Belinda Leach, and Winnie Lem. 2012. Confronting anthropology: The

critical enquiry of capitalism. In Pauline G. Barber, Belinda Leach, and Winnie Lem,

eds., Confronting capital: Anthropology, critique, praxis, pp. 1–16. New York:

Routledge.

Boyle, James. 2002. Fencing off ideas: Enclosure and the disappearance of the public domain.

Daedalus 131(2): 13–25.

Brown, Michael F. 1998. Can culture be copyrighted? Current anthropology 39(2): 193–222.

Burawoy, Michael, and Katherine Verdery, eds. 1999. Uncertain transition: Ethnographies of

change in the postsocialist world. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Busse, Mark, and Veronica Strang. 2011. Introduction: Ownership and appropriation. In Mark

Busse and Veronica Strang, eds., Ownership and appropriation. New York: Berg.

Carrier, James, and Don Kalb, eds. 2015. Anthropologies of class. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical

difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Clarke, John. 2008. Living with/in and without neo-liberalism. Focaal: European Journal of

Anthropology 51: 135–147.

Coleman, Simon. 2000. The globalisation of charismatic Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Collier, Stephen J. 2012. Neoliberalism as big Leviathan, or…? A response to Wacquant and

Hilgers. Social Anthropology 20(2): 186–195.

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff, eds. 2001. Millennial capitalism and the culture of

neoliberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Engelke, Matthew. 2010. Past Pentecostalism: Notes on rupture, realignment, and everyday

life in Pentecostal and African independent churches. Africa 80(2): 177–199.

Everett, Margaret. 2003. The social life of genes: Privacy, property, and the new genetics.

Social science and medicine 56(1): 53–65.

Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The modernity of witchcraft: Politics and the occult in postcolonial

Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Greene, Shane. 2004. Indigenous people incorporated? Culture as politics, culture as property

in pharmaceutical bioprospecting. Current Anthropology 45(2): 211–237.

Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. Notes on post-secular society. New Perspectives Quarterly 25(4):

17–29.

Hann, Chris M., ed. 2003a. Postsocialism: Ideals, ideologies, and practices in Eurasia.

London: Routledge.

Hann, Chris M., ed. 2003b. The postsocialist agrarian question: Property relations and the

rural condition. Münster: LIT Verlag.

Harvey, David. 2005. The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Humphrey, Caroline, and Katherine Verdery. 2004. Introduction: Raising questions about

property. In Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey, eds., Property in question:

Value transformation in the global economy, pp. 1–25. Oxford: Berg.

Jameson, Fredric, ed. 1991. Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham:

Duke University Press.

Kalb, Don. 1997. Expanding class: Power and everyday politics in industrial communities,

The Netherlands, 1850–1950. Durham: Duke University Press

Kalb, Don. 2015. Introduction: Class and the new anthropological holism. In James Carrier

and Don Kalb, eds., Anthropologies of Class, pp. 1–27. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Kalb, Don, and Gábor Halmai, eds. 2011. Headlines of nation, subtexts of class: Working-class

populism and the return of the repressed in neoliberal Europe. New York: Berghahn

Books.

Kalb, Don, and Helmut Tak. 2005. Critical junctions: Recapturing anthropology and history.

In Don Kalb and Helmut Tak, eds., Critical junctions: Anthropology and history beyond

the cultural turn, pp. 1–27. New York: Berghahn Books.

Kasmir, Sharryn, and August Carbonella. 2014. Blood and fire, toward a global anthropology

of labor. New York: Berghahn Books.

Li, Tania Murray. 1996. Images of community: Discourse and strategy in property relations.

Development and Change 27(3): 501–527.

Li, Tania Murray. 2010. To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of

surplus populations. Antipode 41(S1): 66–93.

Lund, Christian. 2011. Property and citizenship: Conceptually connecting land rights and

belonging in Africa. Africa Spectrum 46(3): 71–75.

McRobbie, Angela. 2004. Post-feminism and popular culture. Feminist Media Studies 4(3):

255–264.

McRobbie, Angela. 2011. Reflections on feminism, immaterial labour, and the post-Fordist

regime. New Formations 70(1): 60–76.

Narotzky, Susana, and Gavin A. Smith. 2006. Immediate struggles: People, power, and place

in rural Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nugent, David. 1993. Anthropology, political economy, and the Blackfeet. American

Ethnologist 20(2): 336–362.

Otto, Ton. 2010. What happened to cargo cults? In Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin

Eriksen, eds., Contemporary religiosities: Emergent socialities and the post-nation-state,

pp. 53–82. New York: Berghahn Books.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in

late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Peck, Jamie, and Nik Theodore. 2012. Reanimating neoliberalism: Process geographies of

neoliberalisation. Social Anthropology 20(2): 177–185.

Reardon, Jenny, and Kim TallBear. 2012. “Your DNA is our history”: Genomics,

anthropology, and the construction of whiteness as property. Current Anthropology

53(S5): S233–S245.

Robbins, Joel. 2013. Beyond the suffering subject: Toward an anthropology of the good.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19:447–462.

Rudnyckyj, Daromir. 2010. Spiritual economies: Islam, globalization, and the afterlife of

development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage.

Sennett, Richard. 1998. The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the

new capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton.

Sharp, Lesley. A. 2000. The commodification of the body and its parts. Annual Review of

Anthropology 29:287–328.

Smith, Gavin. 2014. Intellectuals and (counter-)politics: Essays in historical realism. New

York: Berghahn Books.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. Cutting the network. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

2(3): 517–535.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2000. Audit cultures: Anthropological studies in accountability, ethics, and

the academy. London: Routledge.

Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press.

Van Meijl, Toon. 2012. Changing property regimes in Maori society: A critical assessment of

the settlement process in New Zealand. Journal of the Polynesian Society 121(2):181–

208.

Ventura, Patricia. 2012. Neoliberal culture: Living with American neoliberalism. Farnham:

Ashgate.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2012. Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing

neoliberalism. Social Anthropology 20(2): 66–79.

Wilson, Ara, ed. 2012. The Empire debate: Hardt and Negri’s anthropological encounter.

Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 64: 3–65.

Worsley, Peter. 1957. The trumpet shall sound. London: MacGibbon and Kee.