Social Anthropology : Issue : Berghahn Journals

This article seeks to contribute to the anthropological analysis of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project of capitalist social transformation through a close examination of the ideological legitimation of austerity‐driven public‐sector retrenchment in Serbia. It shows how long‐term continuities of political economy and public discourse create opportunities for market populist elites to sell neoliberalism as a moral project. Persistent structural conditions, especially scarcity of jobs, and an established popular discourse about the excessive and corrupt public sector provide a fertile soil for a moral ideology that justifies neoliberal policies as a redress to an immoral redistribution of societal resources.

Eriksen, Thomas H., Christina Garsten and Shalini Randeria (eds.). 2014. Anthropology Now and Next: Essays in Honor of Ulf Hannerz. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 324 pp. Hb.: $110.00/£68.00. ISBN: 978 178238 449 6.

Lucille Lisack

Ruined futures

Managing instability in post‐earthquake Van (Turkey)

Marlene Schäfers

This article investigates how ruined materialities are implicated in projects of governance by affecting people's abilities to engage with the future. Based on ethnographic material from the Kurdish‐inhabited city of Van (Turkey), which was heavily damaged by two earthquakes in 2011, I analyse Turkish state authorities’ mobilisation of expertise regarding Van's ruined built environment as a form of techno‐political governance. Yet as ruins’ material properties continuously exceeded attempts at governing them, they created a particular structure of risk, thereby contributing to the formation of political subjects feeling themselves to be at the constant peril of both natural and political disaster.

Naraindas, Harish, Johannes Quack and William S. Sax (eds.) 2014. Asymmetrical conversations: contestations, circumventions, and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries. New York: Berghahn Books. 276 pp. Hb.: US$82.59. ISBN‐13: 978‐1782383086.

Venera Khalikova

Bull, M. and Jon P. Mitchell (eds.) 2015. Ritual, performance and the senses. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 208 pp. Pb.: £60.00. ISBN: 9780857854735.

Sander Holsgens

Knight, Daniel. 2015. History, time and economic crisis in central Greece. Hampshire: Palgrave‐Macmillan. 201 pp. Pb.: £65.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐137‐50148‐6.

Joost Beuving

Hromadžić, Azra. 2015. Citizens of an empty nation: youth and state‐making in postwar Bosnia‐Herzegovina. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 239 pp. Hb: £39.00. ISBN: 9780812247008.

Catherine Baker

Drazin, Adam and Susanne Küchler (eds.) 2015. The social life of materials: studies in materials and society. London and New York: Bloomsbury. 301 pp. Pb.: £24.99. ISBN: 978‐1‐4725‐9264‐4.

Amy Penfield

Boellstorff, Tom and Bill Maurer (eds.) 2015. Data, now bigger and better! Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. 104 pp. Pb.: $12.95. ISBN: 9780984201068.

Mark Maguire

Figuring out the university and the student in neoliberal times: reviews of (Hyatt, Shear and Wright 2015) and (Nielsen 2015)

Peidong Yang

Marinaro Clough, Isabella and Bjørn Thomassen (eds.). 2014. Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City (New Anthropologies of Europe). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 310 pp. Pb.: $27. ISBN: 978‐0253012951.

Cristiana Panella

‘Contagious’ solidarity

Reconfiguring care and citizenship in Greece's social clinics

Heath Cabot

In response to growing numbers of people unable to access national healthcare, networks of ‘social solidarity’ clinics/pharmacies have emerged throughout Greece. These clinics/pharmacies redistribute donated medicines, and they provide care through networks of volunteers. They thus seek to respond to the growing ‘contagion’ of austerity in Greece with what some describe as ‘contagious’ solidarity. Discourses regarding social health also permeate the clinics. Solidarity is often described as the ‘other face’ of the crisis, which has brought group participation into the centre of Greek citizenship. Research participants, however, also reflect ambivalently on their work, exposing solidarity's entanglement in austerity politics and neoliberal subjectivity.

Solidarity

The egalitarian tensions of a bridge‐concept

Theodoros Rakopoulos

In looking at the other side of the crisis regarding solidarity networks in Greece, this piece provides an introductory overview for a special section of that deals with topical issues such as the effects of austerity measures.

Philanthropy or solidarity? Ethical dilemmas about humanitarianism in crisis‐afflicted Greece

Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

That philanthropy perpetuates the conditions that cause inequality is an old argument shared by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde and Slavoj Žižek. I recorded variations of the same argument in local conversations regarding growing humanitarian concern in austerity‐ridden Greece. Local critiques of the efficacy of humanitarianism, which I explore here ethnographically, bring to the fore two parallel possibilities engendered by the ‘humanitarian face’ of solidarity initiatives: first, their empowering potential (where solidarity initiatives enhance local social awareness), and second, the de‐politicisation of the crisis (a liability that stems from the effectiveness of humanitarianism in ameliorating only temporarily the superficial consequences of the crisis). These two possibilities – which I treat as simultaneous and interrelated – can help us appreciate the complexity and social embeddedness of humanitarian solidarity in times of austerity.

Socialities of solidarity

Revisiting the gift taboo in times of crises

Katerina Rozakou

This article addresses solidarity and the opening of social spaces in the relations between refugees and residents of Greece who try to help them. ‘Socialities of solidarity’ materialise alternative worldviews; they are loci for the production of lateral relationships; places inhabited by the prospects that derive from the political production of sociality. The article discusses the ‘gift taboo’, dominant in the pre‐crisis era, that reflects the risks of giving to the formation of horizontal relationships. In the contemporary ‘European refugee crisis, and other crises, the gift taboo has collapsed, posing challenges to the egalitarian visions of sociality.

Social Anthropology

Anthropologie sociale

Volume 24 Issue 2

Barnes, Jessica. 2014. Cultivating the Nile: the everyday politics of water in Egypt. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 230 pp. Pb.: US$24.95. ISBN: 9780822357568.

Ghodsee, Kristen. 2015. The left side of history: World War II and the unfulfilled promise of Communism in Eastern Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 256 pp. Pb.: £15.99. ISBN: 9780822358350.

Hocking, Bree T. 2015. The great reimagining: public art, urban space and the symbolic landscapes of a ‘new’ Northern Ireland. New York: Berghahn (Material mediations: people and things in a world of movement; volume 4). 232 pp. US$95.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐78238‐621‐6.

Anders G. and O. Zenker (eds.) 2015. Transition and justice. Negotiating the terms of new beginnings in Africa. New York: Wiley‐Blackwell. 245 pp. Pb.: US$31.13. ISBN: 9781118944776.

Schechter, K. 2014. Illusions of a future: psychoanalysis and the biopolitics of desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. 288 pp. Pb: US$18.34. ISBN: 978‐0822357216.

Kuper, Adam. 2015. Anthropology and anthropologists: the British school in the twentieth century. London: Routledge. xvii + 152 pp., illustrations, appendices, index. Pb.: US$42.70. ISBN: 978‐0‐415‐73634‐3.

Kulick, Don and Jens Rydström. 2015. Loneliness and its opposite: sex, disability, and the ethics of engagement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 362 pp. Pb.: £17.99. ISBN: 9780822358336.

Kasmir, Sharryn and August Carbonella (eds.) 2014. Blood and fire. Toward a global anthropology of labor. New York: Berghahn Books. 298 pp. Hb.: US$95.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐78238‐363‐5.

Issue information ‐ TOC

The justice of neoliberalism

Moral ideology and redistributive politics of public‐sector retrenchment in Serbia