Plenary panels
Day 1 - Transforming States
Convenor: Dr. Benjamin R. Smith, CAEPR, ANU
The demise of the state – recently the topic of considerable scholarly and public comment – has clearly been greatly exaggerated. If anything, it now appears that the state’s presence is increasing in a range of social contexts. At the same time, it is also evident that the state is changing. Neoliberalism and the ‘new public management’ have led to new relationships between the state and other aspects of society across the globe, while other states have transformed themselves through the resurgence of socialism or religion in explicit opposition to the spread of neoliberal government. Such social and political transformations are closely linked to cultural transformations and continuities from the local through to the national scale and beyond.
One aspect of the modern state – as a social form – of particular interest to anthropologists is its dependence on particular kinds of personhood or subjectivity. Indeed, states seem to be increasingly engaged in projects aimed at producing particular kinds of persons. Thus, just as the state form is itself being transformed, so too is the state transforming those subject to its influence. Moreover, although such projects are particularly prevalent at present, historical analyses suggest that many states have long sought to produce such transformations among those subject to their government.
This plenary seeks to build on recent anthropological writing on the state to explore the changing character of the modern state in both of these senses – as a changing social form, and as socially and subjectively transformative force. The plenary will focus on three key questions for the anthropology of the state:
- What is state-formation, anthropologically speaking?
- What significant transformations are occurring in modern states and how can we study them?
- By what means do states attempt to shape local forms of subjectivity and personhood?
Cris Shore (Auckland) University of Auckland - Anthropology, State-Formation and Regulatory Governance: EU Bureaucracy as a Site for Analysing the (Post?)-Modern State
Patrick Sullivan Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies - The Inconsistent State: Managerialism, Accountability and Engagement with Australian Indigenous Peoples
Christopher Houston Macquarie University - State-initiated Social Engineering: The Art of Cultural Revolution in Turkey
Day 2 - The economic in contemporary anthropology
Convenor: Francesca Merlan, Australian National University
Across large areas of the social sciences --- especially those that are most influential in the policy arena --- economistic perspectives on human social life have played an increasingly central role over the past twenty years. Anthropology has generally gone in the opposite direction, emphasizing the cultural embeddedness of all kinds of human productive activity --- including those that are conventionally abstracted as economy --- and using its own cross-cultural perspective to critique the economistic one as overly narrow, and deluded in its claims to universality. In response to this situation, some anthropologists, or theorists who have gained a following within anthropology, have critically explored the carving out of a separate domain of the economy, while others, such as Bourdieu with his concepts of strategy and symbolic capital, have tried to rework and/or revive notions of economy in such a way as make it more adequate to human social life as it is actually lived around the world.
The aim of this panel is to examine and assess the value of various concepts of ‘economy’ or ‘the economic’ for the work of anthropology. Panelists have been invited to position their own work in relation to these concepts, arguing for their utility or otherwise.
Among issues to be addressed by the panelists and In the discussion are the following:
- anthropology and its location within the western capitalist context as this conditions anthropology’s takes on `economy’
- moves to re-frame `economy’
- forms of subjectivity associated with the `alternative economies’ notion, or comparative subjectivities in economic modelling
Chris Gregory - Whatever happened to economic anthropology?
Diane Austin-Broos – University of Sydney - Anthropology, Economic and Social: opening the door
Deirdre McKay, Australian National University- Performing economy differently: exploring economic personhood and local economic diversity
Jon Altman - The hybrid economy and anthropological engagements with policy discourse
