Barber Pauline Gardiner - Confronting capital: critique and engagement in anthropology

This volume comes out of a continuing dialogue among colleagues, scholars and friends in many different fora. In particular, the editors would like to thank the participants of the Anthropology and Political Economy Seminar (APES) for their commitment to critical scholarship and openness to debate. Several of the essays in this collection were first presented in panels entitled Confronting Capitalism at the Canadian Anthropology Society annual conference in Vancouver in 2009. We thank Ananth Aiyer, Malcolm Blincow, August Carbonella, Guillermo de la Pea, Kirk Dombrowski, Leslie Jermyn, Tania Li, David Nugent, Roger Rouse, Jane Schneider, and Peter Schneider who also participated in those panels and contributed to the associated discussions

Those panels were organized to celebrate and engage with the contributions of Gavin Smith to anthropology. Gavins workin writing and through conversationhas richly shaped and influenced the scholarly trajectories of all the contributors to this volume, for whom he has been wise teacher and mentor, insightful interlocutor, supportive colleague, and kind friend. His particular combination of intellectual generosity and challenge has been felt by all of us, and our work is much the better for it. Our thanks and appreciation go to him for this ongoing engagement.

A huge thank you is owed to Clare Morgan and William Campbell whose work in helping to prepare the manuscript was excellent and indispensable. We also extend our thanks to Max Novick at Routledge for his enthusiastic support, kindness and patience. Also at the press, we thank Eleanor Chan and Jennifer Morrow for their diligent work in overseeing the production of the manuscript. Thanks also to Bruce Barber and Ross Butler for their critical commentary and encouragement during various phases in the preparation of this work. A final note of thanks is owed to the anonymous reviewers of this volume for their enthusiastic and insightful commentary.

Confronting Anthropology: The Critical Enquiry of Capitalism

Pauline Gardiner Barber, Belinda Leach and Winnie Lem

They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. Slavoj iek addressing the Occupy Wall Street protest, October 2, 2011.

As our world continues to be beset by profound transformations and crises, people are called upon to contend with the uncertainties and deprivations of a global economy restructured by the architects of a neoliberal order.

Linked to these vociferous politics are the struggles of ordinary people that centre upon the everyday dilemmas and routinized practices associated with securing a livelihood, ever subject to the vagaries of capital and the elites who are its proponents, brokers, and primary beneficiaries. In Asia, new generations of workers who have come of age during this era of tumult are engaged in mobilizations to contest the conditions of exploitation that prevail in workplaces conditioned by the drive toward hyper accumulation in contemporary production regimes. In China, the factory of the World, such struggles against national and international capital embodied in the transnational firm have involved collective suicides, traffic blockages, and strikes as well as civil disobedience in the face of pro-capitalist development at any cost (Lee 2007; Ngai et al. 2010).

In their work, anthropologists have unique critical purchase on the complexities and contradictions of these and varied other responses to capitalism, its ever-changing faces. This volume is in fact a collaboration of scholarsall anthropologistswhose intellectual labor is precisely devoted to confronting capital. Its central purpose is to advance a framework for apprehending the complex contours of peoples everyday struggles against deprivation and precariousness. It does so through the consistent application of a critical political economy perspective. We contend that the tradition of political economy in anthropology is fundamental to our disciplines interrogation of the contemporary world. While our work examines what provokes people to engage with their political worlds with such courage, force and often with violence, the chapters here are primarily motivated by a deep commitment to developing an understanding of the entanglements of ordinary people within capitalism. Through fine-tuned ethnography our analyses are focused on the routinized encounters with capital that do not necessarily result in collective contestations. While we pay attention to preconditions for political mobilization, our work critically enquires into the challenges of the complicated quotidian. For the people whose lives we attempt to represent, capital is confronted in overtly political acts, but also, importantly, in the everyday practices of pursuing livelihoods, securing food and finding shelter. We take our title thus to incorporate a double agency in that both the anthropologists writing in this book, and the people we write about, are confronting capital.