Critique of Anthropology

In a contradictory fashion, researchers, their departments and universities simultaneously recognize the unpredictability of fieldwork experiences and outcomes and help establish a bureaucratic system of planning every component of their research. Ethnographic unpredictability and its consequences are a fact of fieldwork and it is essential that researchers and institutions are prepared to view these as part of interpretable data, to learn from them and not mask them. This article examines ethnographic unpredictability through the lens of sexual violence which I experienced during my doctoral fieldwork in Sierra Leone. I show how I redirected my research and renegotiated my position as an academic. I discuss the culture of risk and analyse the influence of neoliberalism on the university. I describe how ‘market logic’ conceptualizes unpredictability as competitive disadvantage. I show the impact that the imaginary ‘perfect academic’ has on early career researchers and the complicity of mainstream academic (re-)presentation in nourishing the image of the ‘in-control academic’ through muting personal field experiences and vulnerabilities and silencing unpredictable occurrences in academic writing. I conclude with recommendations on how personal situatedness, vulnerabilities, and transformations can be approached as factors in every research endeavour which must not pose threats to an institution’s competitive advantage.

This article is about the continued salience of a particular understanding of moral economy in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the fact that a significant body of anthropological theory argues against simplified binaries of market and moral economies, such binaries persist. These either romanticise or vilify moral economies and exist in both policy and academic contexts. Thus, moral economies are said to drive corruption or shape anti-market cultural stances. Meanwhile, a romantic fantasy of a non-capitalist rural economy oriented by morality rather than economic rationality continues to animate areas of development policy and to direct funding. My argument is not with the concept of moral economy itself, but with how it is marshalled in support of both romantic and sometimes negatively essentialised conceptions of people and places. The article sets out the case for the persistence of these ideas, focusing on their application to irrigation development and the problems with this. I then use an example from southern Malawi to illustrate how moral ideas of fairness and reciprocity interplay with processes of differentiation in access to (and exclusion from) land and labour and influence how people manage scarce resources. Whilst there are moral discourses and a mutual embeddedness of the moral and economic, these reflect a range of ethically informed positions which are influenced by social position and power. However, this emic perspective is largely absent from the more romanticised models. I conclude by reflecting on the politics of their persistence.

The public display and lavish spending of wealth for other-than-economic ends has been a topic of vital importance in anthropology and sociology. Studies on the expansion of markets and transnational mobility in Latin American rely on the persistent idea that new economic riches are turned into recognition, prestige and power through feast sponsorship in home communities. In this article, I demonstrate that among Bolivian traders who regularly source in Chile and China, stewardship of a dance group for a patronal fiesta in La Paz has ceased to be a sponsorship and become an investment. Traders have integrated the advance of fiesta-related money into their loops of capital, but they also depend on social ties and reciprocal obligations to make a profit. A translocal perspective is deployed in order to understand the entanglement of trading and feasting: traders’ experiences with the global economy and the persistence of fiesta-specific forms of mutuality as well as the principle of rotation of the stewardship. I argue that as webs of fiesta-related trades and services change year after year, business opportunities are temporarily distributed.

This brief report discusses the Hong Kong protests of 2019–2020 in terms of cultural and national identity. It examines how Hongkongers have had no concept of what it means to belong to a nation throughout their history; but because of the ham-handed efforts by the Hong Kong government to enforce Chinese national identity, many young Hongkongers have reacted by embracing a different “nation”: Hong Kong. It also examines how many young Hongkongers have embraced a civic rather than an ethnic concept of who can be a Hongkonger, one that may lead, paradoxically, to a rejection of mainland Chinese as Hongkongers and to an acceptance of those who are not mainland Chinese.

In hindsight, that the institutional framework of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (OCTS), the political and socio-economic blueprint for ensuring the continuity of Hong Kong as a capitalist economy, with guarantees of freedom of speech and a high degree of autonomy from China’s socialist and authoritarian rule after a change of sovereignty in 1997, gets caught in political crossfire is inevitable. OCTS was a historical compromise in the early 1980s when the deadlock of Hong Kong’s uncertain political future was resolved by finding a way to convince all the concerned parties that the colony’s prosperity and stability would be guaranteed after a change in its political status. But the premises and parameters of the pact have significantly changed since the signing of the Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong by China and Britain in 1984. The storm over the Extradition Bill has its roots in the fissures inherent in the institutional framework of OCTS. This paper is an attempt to analyse social protests arising from the Extradition Bill in Hong Kong in 2019 in the light of the former British colony’s extended political transition.

Social scientists are prone to define social movements as something extraordinary, existing outside the mundane world of daily routines and lives. However, as the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong has illustrated, protest and daily routines often overlap. This is due in part to the decentralisation of protest events geographically and the mobilisation of conventional life spaces and cultural repertoires as protest tactics. When protests become daily events and daily events become protests, ordinary people can no longer maintain ‘neutrality’ by claiming that they are just ‘distant spectators’. They are turned into witnesses of history, forced to make a moral judgment and take a stand. The situation also creates new roles for those not directly involved in the movement to participate in the movement. At the same time, this ‘invasion’ of the ordinary and the local by the harbingers of political conflict, has bred fear and white terror among neighbours in local communities.