Social Anthropology

Unequal expressions

Emotions and narratives of leaving and remaining in precarious academia

Martins, Rosana and Massimo Canevacci (eds.). 2018. Lusophone hip‐hop: ‘who we are’ and ‘where we are’: identity, urban culture and belonging. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing. 316 pp. Hb.: £65.00. ISBN: 9781907774126.

Anthropology is nothing if it is not a particular way of describing the world. Yet what is most precious to it – the terms and concepts that mark it as a discipline – can also be the most tricky. When resurgent boundaries and exclusions twist truth telling and faking in any which way, anthropology might find a new urgency in thinking about the conceptual life it tries to express. How it engages has always depended on (attention to) how terms are used, something shared with those who people its subject matter. Critical attention has never been more important. An exploration into the colourings and resonances of diverse verbal usages, old and new, points to moments where language works both with us and against us. Indeed supports for xenophobia and the like may be embedded where least expected. Out of it all, the lecture imagines a future for anthropological exposition. There could be no better place to start than in EASA's many‐languaged company.

Amico, Marta. 2020. La fabrique d’une musique touarègue. Un son du désert dans la World Music. Paris: Karthala. 320 pp. Pb.: €29.00. ISBN: 978‐2‐8111‐2688‐9.

Liberalism follows a grammar when representing voluntary social relationships that involve some element of exchange; it reduces them to relations of pure exchange. This paper examines the transmission of this grammar across cultural lines, from the progressive officials comprising Brazil’s Workers’ Party government (2003–2016) to the inhabitants of the country’s northeastern backlands () whose ‘clientelistic’ politics the officials sought to dismantle. By analysing ’ abandonment of the once‐common practice of displaying campaign propaganda on their homes, I hope to explain the political implications of the spread of this grammatical logic – what I call the – to a people who have long embedded political transactions within elector–politician ‘friendships’.

This paper examines the limits of Cynical parrhesia. Based on fieldwork with artist‐activists in post‐recession Dublin, I recount their fraught efforts to use adventurous artistic expression to provoke a critical awakening in an audience of strangers, who instead respond with derision. My focus is thus on a narrow but prevalent feature of artists’ work and lives, and the public’s experience of challenging genres of provocative public criticism: the encounter with unintelligibility and alienation in the public sphere. I thus deploy ‘bad parrhesia’ as a tool through which to consider the factors that mitigate against artists establishing the desired critical relationship with audiences. Nevertheless, though these parrhesiastic encounters do not succeed, I argue that they do not yield an absence of social relations but relations of an anti‐social kind. Departing from readings of parrhesia as a form of individualism, corrosive to relationality, or a playful reaction against the failures of liberal democratic politics, I make a case for framing parrhesia as a relationship of contestation over which kinds of public criticism are judged to be intelligible and valuable responses to moments of cultural crisis in northern liberal democracies.

This paper traces the evolution of discourse about liberal democracy among Polish‐Vietnamese pro‐democracy activists, since their original mobilisations in the 1990s until today. Documenting what I call the two waves of Polish‐Vietnamese activism, I describe how their ‘diasporic liberalism’ shifted from a stance of opposition to communist ideology, and from a belief in the ‘end of history’, to an approach focused on bottom‐up democratisation and embrace of transnational frames of environmentalism, rule of law, rights and ‘civil society’. Such evolution of activists’ discourses and networks ultimately tracks the transformation of Western liberalism itself, both in terms of the ascendancy of neoliberal imagery of ground‐up citizenly empowerment and, more recently, the emergent right‐wing challenge to liberal‐democratic order in Europe, in response to neoliberal dislocation of the traditional working class. Analysing the activists’ shifting engagements with Polish liberal thought and Vietnam’s socialist democracy, this paper makes the case for thinking of liberalism as lacking an original or essential form. Rather it can be thought of in diaspora‐like terms, as a ‘globally mobile category’, brought into existence in varied, situated ways through ongoing mobilisation.

Despite extensive writing about liberalism in anthropology, liberal subjects and publics remain strangely elusive as objects of ethnographic enquiry. Anthropologists have mostly studied liberalism in light of new forms that supersede and reconfigure it, or in light of the marginalised subjects it excludes. These approaches have produced useful critical insights, but they have left liberal publics and subjects themselves hanging in a zone of ethnographic indistinction, front and centre of the picture as objects of critique, and yet persistently out of ethnographic focus. Liberalism itself features in the end as little more than a mirage, a constitutive impossibility: a practice that is abstract, a place of no place, an impersonal form of personhood. This paper explores the limits of these approaches by considering different possible readings of an ethnographic setting in which ‘the liberal public sphere’ is imagined, challenged and policed: a courtroom in Paris that specialises in press law. The paper suggests one potential way out of the ethnographic elusiveness of liberalism, by taking seriously the ways in which the impossibility of liberal ideals is already critically acknowledged by (and written into) the practices, institutions and forms of subjectivity that nevertheless seek to orient towards them.

The hierarchical right

I propose an alternative conception of freedom in an actually existing liberal order by focusing on how gay men in Podgorica, Montenegro maintain love kinship relations. For theorists of late liberalism, the demands of liberal freedom and those of social relatedness have been seen as opposed. By contrast, in Podgorica we can trace a notion of non‐autological freedom understood as an ability to engage in a certain practice while thinking through its conditions and constraints from multiple perspectives and in a way that my interlocutors saw as respectful of others. Linking anthropological discussions of freedom with a focus on ordinary ethics, I offer an understanding of freedom as a relational category practised through an open and shared deliberation and imaginative identification, which echoes Polanyi’s notion of social freedom. Gay men who pursued love and sexual fulfilment as well as stringent family expectations did not enact freedom as always‐already individualised subjects who made autonomous choices; they came into being as particular socio‐moral persons by deliberating either collectively, through an actual conversation, or by engaging in imaginative identification with others. By placing both relationality and deliberation at the heart of freedom, this article contributes to anthropological discussions about this concept.

This article explores the place of liberal subjectivity in the professional culture of Ukrainian journalists to analyse how ideas originating in contexts of hegemonic liberalism at the core of the global capitalist system, are taken up on its postsocialist margins. I outline how certain Anglo‐American notions of good journalistic practice, which encode traits of liberal subjectivity, are borrowed and elaborated by a Western‐funded movement for an anti‐oligarchic liberal media reform in Ukraine. These ideals are then taken up within oligarch‐controlled media, a context that the reformers see as inimical to liberalism. Through an ethnographic portrait of an editor‐censor at a major oligarch‐owned TV channel in Ukraine, I analyse how these professional ideals simultaneously uphold oligarchic patronage and extend the reach of liberal politics in Ukraine. This reveals how in the force field of global capitalism both the reformers and those whom they seek to reform are part of the same, contradictory and fractured, liberal formation. I propose that to better understand cases like this, we need to learn to see liberalism in fragments: as always partial and incomplete and as constituted by multiple elements.

This afterward draws together insights from the articles in the special section on liberalism and points to a growing disjuncture between the liberalism of those who claim to represent liberalism and the liberalism of those who are accused of illiberalism even as they engage in a variety of liberal practices. The articles suggest that it is important to look for capillary liberal practices in the shadows of the current liberal battlegrounds. This might require a renaming exercise to distinguish the currently dominant form of liberalism from its more subtle manifestations.

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