Social Anthropology

The reliance of welfare recipients on the state is classically demonised as a relation of dependency: one that foments passivity on the part of claimants. Critical voices in austerity Britain have drawn attention to government efforts to reconfigure that relationship, by ‘reforming’ welfare, remaking the grantee as a repaying loan‐taker and turning dependents into responsible, autonomous citizens. This paper, based on research in the debt advice sector in England, shows that dependency may involve unexpected directionalities of reliance. (Those who appear as state dependents in one register can be those depended upon in another.) It focuses in particular on encounters with migrants, describing what the process of ‘transnational householding’ tells us about dependency. It discusses the relations between advisers and clients, showing how advice charities create a parallel system of care and support. A punitive and debt‐based welfare system means that many clients owe money to the state as well as to commercial creditors. Austerity and welfare reform are rendering individuals’ obligations to family members and others fragile and insecure. But given advisers’ intervention between a hostile bureaucracy and debtors, the experience of reckoning, owing money and settling accounts can end up as something more akin to householding than to controlling discipline.

Nature as a constellation of activities

Movement, rhythm and perception in an Italian national park

In this paper, I discuss the reactions to European wild boars () in the Brazilian–Uruguayan border region from an ethnographic point of view. Drawing on the concept of taskscape, I explore the reasons why these animals are regarded as ‘bandits’ by local agents, as well as the differences in perception between the threat posed by boars and by other non‐native species also present in the Pampa biome, such as Australian eucalyptus ( sp.), Pinus ( sp) and South‐African tough lovegrass (). By contrasting scientific and local views of ‘invasive species’, I argue that the reactions to are connected to the transformations that the Pampa landscape has been undergoing throughout its socio‐environmental history. Namely, the deeply agonistic pattern of human–animal relations that constituted the prairie, as well as the tensions concerning the relations of property and labour in rural areas. Furthermore, in line with the approach that sees landscapes as shaped by different ‘tasks’, I explore local notions of ‘work’ in order to offer an alternative interpretation for the problem of biological invasions, beyond the territorial approach that permeates the literature on the subject.

This paper addresses the joint becoming of landscapes, agricultural tasks and prairie rodents in the French Jura uplands, where the development of hay monoculture triggered outbreaks of water voles that reduce pastures to dust. I explore links between processual landscape anthropology and contemporary scholarship on more‐than‐human entanglements in order to follow how ecological disruptions called for the development of new arts of noticing towards multispecies life. I first describe the relationships between Jura farmers, voles, fields and agricultural modernisation programmes, and suggest that vole outbreaks bring these together around shared tasks. I then consider how disputes over how to control voles led to changes in farmers’ ways of caring for their cows and tending the fields. I argue that these underlined changes in their ways of understanding and responding to the rhythms of the landscape’s more‐than‐human activities. Finally, I draw on the example of conflicts between farmers over whether cows or pastures should be more central to their work. I make the case that to be attentive to fields as a landscape in the Jura is ultimately to define the (in)appropriateness of certain actions and tasks. It becomes constitutive of what ‘good farming’ should be, and precipitates new identities.

In his 1993 essay ‘The temporality of the landscape’, Tim Ingold argued that landscape develops through processes of temporality, that is time as it emerges in the unfolding of life through action. This association between temporality and landscape was expressed by the term ‘taskscape’ In our introduction to this section, we return to the concept of taskscape to assess its usefulness in light of a number of developments in the understanding of human–environment relations. These include the changing conceptualisation of ‘landscape’ and the emergence of new approaches for understanding relations across species. We explain the ways that the three authors in this section use taskscape to think through political tensions and to explore how landscapes are achieved through inter‐relating actions of humans and other beings. We conclude by emphasising the heuristic value of taskscape as a means of thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene. Both taskscape and Anthropocene are concepts that draw together human history and the shaping of the world and, as such, the taskscape offers a novel means to explore and understand the dynamics of Anthropocene environmental relations.

Platenkamp, Jos D.M. and Almut, Schneider (eds.) 2019. Integrating strangers in society: perspectives from elsewhere. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 229 pp. Hb.: €96.29. ISBN: 978‐3‐030‐16702‐8.

This article aims to place dependency into a conversation with its opposite, sovereignty. It does so by proposing that the two concepts work dialectically, thereby casting doubt on the ideal type of sovereignty that predominates in political theory. Relying on examples from 19th‐century debtors’ prisons and 21st‐century offshore havens, the article argues that complete sovereignty is a powerful and driving myth that must be continually contested, recognising instead that all modes of sovereignty entail simultaneous modes of dependency. Ethnographic and historical evidence can help us to chart these complex links of sovereignty and dependency, rather than elevate the former and be suspicious of the latter.

This paper explores some accusations of wrongdoing in Papua New Guinea in the early 2000s. These accusations illustrate an ambiguous encouragement and discouragement of different kinds of perceived dependence as Papua New Guineans struggled with a growing disenchantment with their nation‐state and the withdrawal rather than expansion of state services and assistance. The paper explores the dynamics by which these accusations brought particular dependencies, cast as legitimate and illegitimate, in and out of view, and compares these with other instances in other parts of the world. Ascriptions of ‘dependence’ are shown not only to shift with context but also to be highly performative, being a central means by which persons engaged in highly entangled interdependent relations attempt to re‐shape the nature of those entanglements.

Critical studies of development in the global South have called attention to the failure of existing modernisation projects to deliver on promises of full employment in well‐remunerated wage labour. Despite this shortfall in formal employment, non‐normative labour forms have proliferated globally, alongside mass expansion of financial markets since the late 20th century. In the present article, I take up these multiple trends as interrelated phenomena, inquiring into the work of finance in the extraction of value where individuals labour outside of formal employment. The argument, in brief, is that manifold debt relations have facilitated an effective extraction of value from non‐normative forms of capitalist labour in the informal economy. This argument contrasts with positions that see informal labour as non‐capitalist, or posit such labour as lying outside class relations of exploitation. Ethnographically, I engage these issues through a study of heterogeneous livelihoods among residents of a squatter settlement located in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Myanmar’s former capital, Yangon.

As a response to the reintroduction of border controls at the French/Italian border, which aim to push back undesired migrants, increasing border‐crossing facilitation practices are being carried out by different categories of social actors, including local residents and migrants themselves. In a context of increasing criminalisation of border‐crossing facilitation practices, racialised, non‐white facilitators are usually stigmatised as smugglers acting exclusively in return for payment, while local residents moved by humanitarian concerns are increasingly represented as privileged do‐gooders. This article moves toward a deconstruction of both categories by investigating the discursive motivations of different border‐crossing facilitators and taking into account the unequal structure of opportunities characterising their practices. Through ethnographic accounts and interviews in different localities at the French/Italian border, the article sheds light on the complex coexistence of different interests moving a wide range of actors. The empirical analysis reveals that mere market logics do not reflect the complexity of the figure of the professional facilitator; nor are humanitarian, ethical and political motivations exclusive to white, European citizens providing free help to migrants in distress.

Anxieties around the moral effects of states of ‘dependence’ remain central to political and social debate across the world. At a time when the association between wage‐labour and a particular valorised conception of adult male independence is increasingly hard to sustain, these contests can take on new forms and new levels of intensity. Anthropology has a potentially valuable contribution to make to these discussions, having long made descriptions of particular forms of ‘dependence’ central to many of its most distinctive analytic framings. Nonetheless, the concept of ‘dependence’ itself has rarely been explicitly theorised in anthropological theory, as opposed to other concepts with which it has often been theoretically entwined, such as ‘exchange’, ‘reciprocity’ or ‘debt’, which have been subjected to more concerted theoretical investigation. The papers in this collection provide a series of comparative ethnographic explorations of the role of dependence in shaping new forms of sociality across the globe, as a contribution to the development of an anthropological understanding of the continued evolution of the term’s meaning and effect in the 21st century.

Recent anthropological studies of Italy have presented vivid and compelling accounts of the anxieties about precarity and economic dependence that have emerged as both state protections of employment and social welfare provisions have weakened. This essay, in contrast, argues that for a substantial sector of the Italian populace, work relations have been governed less by a state‐regulated regime of labour than by kinship ideologies and relations. Since the beginning of industrial manufacturing in the mid‐19th century and continuing into the 21st century, family firms have been the dominant employer in Italy. By following the changes in the silk industry and its allied clothing manufacturing sector in the 25 years from 1985 to 2010, this essay shows how aspirations and ascriptions of economic independence and dependence among firm owners, their children and hired managers are shaped by kinship relations and class trajectories.

This article proposes a movement between two sorts of dependency in the secretive bonds of violent men. The first forges an interdependent set of relations between mafia men, independent of the state; the second arises as a dependency of these former on the state in order to break the interdependencies that formerly made them as mafia men. In this ethnographic and oral history narrative, we first witness a dyadic, homosocial relation between two violent men that forges a masculinised interdependence binding the protagonists of this story together as they share a secret. We then encounter the break‐up of this interdependency amid local moral outrage over betrayal and violence, and its substitution by a strong dependence on the state. Through a microsociology that delves into a history of relations, the article thus shows how the subjects of this story shift from one set of dependencies to another. The essay critically revisits discussions of dependency, especially on the state, underscoring the missing element of dependency in the making and breaking of bonds in a secretive male brotherhood.

This article provides an overview of the main European social anthropology journals during 2019. It uses the concept of Exquisite Corpses, a technique devised by the Surrealists, an avant‐garde art group of the early 20th century, to suggest a practice of transmitting knowledge across periods of fracture. It argues that this process characterises the way that some aspects of social anthropology’s canon continue to be transmitted and remain influential, despite having been superseded by time, fashion and changes in social and academic attitudes. A wide range of scholarship is highlighted. Topics focused on include time, relations, borders, bureaucracy, ethics, and the challenges faced by academics in general and anthropologists in particular. These challenges are driven by the emergence of an authoritarian spirit across a number of fields in Europe and beyond, continuing austerity following on from the economic crisis, and the consolidation of an audit culture that drives the university in an ever more neoliberal direction. Despite the current rigorous climate, European social anthropology continues to be vital and relevant.