Projects

At the turn of the century, it was widely assumed--particularly in the West--that the future belonged to global capitalism and liberal democracy. Twenty years later, that confidence is gone, leaving a future that seems both more open-ended and newly constrained (whether by planetary limits, zero-sum competition, authoritarian nativism, or capitalist realism). My research contributes to debate over the significance of this moment by considering how and why people have limited, opposed, or rejected central aspects of liberal representative democracy and neoliberal global capitalism. It does so by engaging with political-economic and cultural formations in which the liberal capitalist world order was consolidated to different degrees, and in distinct ways, than in its (once again unstable) core. As new forms of convergence (like “populism”) have arisen alongside persisting material inequalities, realities and experiences once thought of as distinct can inform each other in new ways, and the varied responses to liberal, global capitalism give a clearer picture of the worlds that are emerging within, out of, and against it.

My contributions to debate on these questions build on the “Back to the 30s?” project I initiated in 2017, which evolved into an extended collaboration with an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to assess the relevance of the interwar period for understanding our historical moment, including conference sessions at the American Anthropological Association and Historical Materialism Athens, as well as an edited volume. I continue to draw on insights from this project as I build on ethnographic research carried out over more than a decade and a half in Costa Rica and Ecuador, through articles and a book manuscript on movements that fostered political and economic institutions at variance with the normative forms of neoliberal capitalist democracy in those countries. In Costa Rica, which maintained public sector monopolies in key sectors long after they had been privatized in the rest of the hemisphere, activist citizens forced the world’s first referendum on a Free Trade Agreement. In Ecuador, which became a point of reference for post-neoliberal governance, the Indigenous movement has defended distinct property forms in land in urban and peri-urban zones of Quito subject to rapid real estate development. In both cases, commitments to fostering forms of direct and participatory democracy were intertwined with the defence of property regimes and market structures that limited how money could be used to appropriate goods including land, water, housing, electricity, and telecommunications—against turn-of-the-century liberalism’s strong marketizing impulse on the one hand, and in opposition to dominant forms of political representation, on the other. Asking how and why these political commitments moved together, and considering their resonances with other manifestations of discontent with turn of the century liberal capitalism, I hope to clarify what it means to pursue “protection” from “the market,” and the complex and often contradictory relationship of that endeavour to commitments to community, emancipation, and justice. I consider how the reaction to commodification can be either (or both) conservative and transformative, nostalgic and future oriented, open and closed; and how collective commitments are being reaffirmed and renewed in the face of pressures towards dissolution.

 
I am also engaged in several writing projects on global-scale political-economic processes and their relationship to anthropological theory. These include an article and book chapter rethinking the articulation of modes of production presented in Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History, which aims to contribute to refining our conceptual tools for talking about the coexistence of varied forms of economic organization in the contemporary capitalist world market. Also following on from the Back to the 30s? project, I have begun research on the discursive and infrastructural production of “transition” in energy and mobility, as a problem of hegemony as well as of techno-economic paradigms, in which material futures are articulated through global initiatives with diverse and unequal, but also combined, local instantiations.