Since 2008, the global economic crisis has exposed and deepened
the tensions between austerity and social security-not just as
competing paradigms of recovery but also as fundamentally different
visions of governmental and personal responsibility. In this sense,
the core premise of neoliberalism-the dominant approach to
government around the world since the 1980s-may by now have reached
a certain political limit. Based on the premise that markets are
more efficient than government, neoliberal reforms were pushed by
powerful national and transnational organizations as conditions of
investment, lending, and trade, often in the name of freedom. In
the same spirit, governments increasingly turned to the private
sector for what were formerly state functions. While it has become
a commonplace to observe that neoliberalism refashioned citizenship
around consumption, the essays in this volume demonstrate the
incompleteness of that image-as the social limits of neoliberalism
are inherent in its very practice.
Ethnographies of Neoliberalism collects original
ethnographic case studies of the effects of neoliberal reform on
the conditions of social participation, such as new understandings
of community, family, and gender roles, the commodification of
learning, new forms of protest against corporate power, and the
restructuring of local political institutions. Carol J. Greenhouse
has brought together scholars in anthropology, communications,
education, English, music, political science, religion, and
sociology to focus on the emergent conditions of political agency
under neoliberal regimes. This is the first volume to address the
effects of neoliberal reform on people's self-understandings as
social and political actors. The essayists consider both the
positive and negative unintended results of neoliberal reform, and
the theoretical contradictions within neoliberalism, as illuminated
by circumstances on the ground in Africa, Europe, South America,
Japan, Russia, and the United States. With an emphasis on the value
of ethnographic methods for understanding neoliberalism's effects
around the world in our own times, Ethnographies of Neoliberalism
uncovers how people realize for themselves the limits of the market
and act accordingly from their own understandings of partnership
and solidarity.
eISBN: 978-0-8122-0001-0
Subjects: Anthropology
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