Focaal

This article engages with the constitution of the anthropology of infrastructure as an autonomous subdiscipline. Rather than laboring in the service of demarcating a new field of study, anthropologists, I argue, should strive for a critical deconstruction of the contemporary infrastructural moment. In the first part of the article, I engage with the arguments in favor of infrastructure as an analytical lens by focusing on their treatment of relationality and materiality. I pinpoint the limitations of these approaches and argue that their epistemological and theoretical assumptions blunt the critical potential of anthropological studies of infrastructure. The second part of the article looks at theoretical alliances that favor connecting the anthropological study of infrastructure with a critical analysis of the production of nature and the built environment.

In his final speech as chair of the assembly that drafted India's Constitution, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar described a contradiction between the formal equality that the Constitution guaranteed and the country's socioeconomic inequality. This article follows two interpretive traditions of India's Constitution: the first, developed by the Supreme Court in challenging land reform legislation, is the doctrine of “basic structure” which holds that the Constitution has an intrinsic, unamendable form. The second, in a low-caste forest rights movement in Uttar Pradesh, holds that, because of Ambedkar's role in its drafting, the true Constitution grants lower castes both socioeconomic equality and sovereignty. Each tradition, I argue, posits a fantasy constitution that resolves Ambedkar's contradiction, claiming to represent a founding constituent order to enact entirely different political visions.

Brazil has endured multiple political, economic, and environmental crises—and now the COVID-19 pandemic—which have drawn social inequalities into razor sharp relief. This contribution analyzes the resilience of rural families facing these crises in southern Bahia. These families have benefited from various redistributive policies over the years, including redistributive land reforms (RLRs), conditional cash transfers (CCTs), and recent emergency aid (EA) payments related to the pandemic. Each (re)distributive approach involves different notions of distributive justice informed by competing background theories of “the good,” which hold implications for concepts of resilience. Drawing on long-term research with RLR communities in Bahia, this article considers the gains achieved by different redistributive programs. Families who acquired land through RLR projects appear more resilient, especially in the face of crisis.

After a spiritual epiphany, the Sakha shaman Alexander Gabyshev became prominent in 2018–2020 by calling Vladimir Putin an authoritarian demon. Critiquing Russia's corrupt society through the internet and a protest march, Alexander rose to civic society leadership with multiethnic sympathizers. This article explains why Alexander became popular, and how he became a threat to Russia's authorities, especially influential Russian Orthodox elites. Alexander's repression is placed in comparative contexts: Robin Hood, Amerindian religious movements, Russia's politicized abuse of psychiatric hospitalization. It examines the relationship among indigeneity, dissidence, and the state in times of trouble, highlighting the ethical need for anthropologists, through long-term and in-depth fieldwork, to expose human rights violations interpreted as changeable. The author views Alexander's potential martyrdom as an indicator of Russia's political and social fragility.

In this article, I analyze Marxist activists’ narratives of becoming Marxist and their practices in activist spaces. Drawing on Jeffrey Juris and Alex Khansnabish's notion of “militant ethnography” and on Jodi Dean's recuperation of the political party form of organizing, I ethnographically describe activists’ motivations to become Marxist and examine two events—a pro-Bernie political meeting and an anti-Trump rally—in which activists intervened with the Marxist idea of “uniting working-class struggles” in democratic spaces. I argue that the socialist party form of organization addresses two related dilemmas that anti-capitalist activists face in the context of systemic economic and political crises in the United States: how to develop class consciousness and how to engage in the seemingly impossible, personally risky endeavor of radically challenging capitalism.

This article draws on fieldwork in the majority Latinx (gender-neutral Latinos/as) rust-belt city of Reading and the majority white suburbs and rural towns of Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States, where three social movement groups are forging a left/liberal alignment. A history of uneven economic and social development in Reading/Berks underlies current divisions that confront the social movement organizations. Scholars grapple with bringing capital's non-waged and marginalized “others” into class analysis, and they remap class stuggles to account for capital's many laborers. The article proposes to apprehend how class is formed by combining difference, in the medium of time, and through political struggle. It explores the hidden relations among diverse populations and highlights the political moments that bring those connections to the fore at a specific historical conjuncture.

The last decade of financial crisis, “financialization” and “quantitative easing” has been a feast of public learning about money and finance. Anthropology, history, and political economy rediscovered a “forgotten” history of money as fundamentally a public good rather than basically a private one. This article discusses the rediscovery of the two competing basic historical theories of money. It also notes that, after a turbulent decade of class and political polarization, including a worldwide pandemic, we also learned that under capitalism it just cannot be publicly conceded that money, if we want to, costs nothing, even though that is scientifically true. The article then reflects upon the current return of inflation and the turn toward “hard and dear money,” and what that might mean.

Michiel Baas. Muscular India: Masculinity, mobility & the new middle class. New Delhi: Context, 2020.

Alice Tilche. Adivasi art and activism: Curation in a nationalist age. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022.

Sanderien Verstappen. New lives in Anand: Building a Muslim hub in Western India. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022.