Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Navigating Austerity -- Section I: The Circuit of State Debt -- 1. Unpredictable Circulations -- Section II: The New Public Good -- 2. Nationalist Melancholia and the Limits of Austerity Public-sector Unionism -- 3. Family Capital, State Pedigree and the Limits of Austerity Public Goods -- Section III: Governing Speculation -- 4. Making a River of Gold: Speculation, Friendship and Entrepreneurial Society -- Section IV: Contradictions in Time -- 5. Ajeet's Accident: Timespaces of Global Trade and Ethical Fixes in Circulation -- 6. Uncertain Futures and Eternal Returns: Timespaces of Production in an Informalized Shipyard -- Section V: Beyond Austerity -- Conclusion 1: Toward a New Social Calculus -- Conclusion 2: Sovereign Debt, Equality and Redistribution -- Notes -- References -- Index.

A rapprochement between the anthropology of history and the anthropology of capitalism has created a temporal turn. This temporal turn has generated new theoretical insights into the times of capitalist modernity and vectors of inequality. Yet research has so far been divided into three separate streams of inquiry. Work addresses the techne (techniques), episteme (knowledge), or phronesis (ethics) of time, following traditions in the social sciences derived from Aristotelian categories. This review explores the potential and limits of such distinctions. It also traces contemporary dominant representations and experiences of time such as short-term market cycles, the anticipatory futures of the security state, and precarity. It follows how time-maps are assembled into technologies of imagination with associated material practices. In conclusion, it proposes a new theoretical vista on time for anthropology based on the heuristic of timescapes. From this perspective, the dynamic interrelationships among techniques, knowledge, and ethics of time can be traced and the inequalities generated by conflicts in time become visible.

Economic theory and technocratic policy have long understood economic action to be a communicative activity. From Pierre-Simon Laplace and Adam Smith to current liberalization fiscal policy in India designed to produce price signals and entrepreneurial behavior this conceptualization has been dominant. Instead this article draws on the anthropology of divination to argue that capitalist action is provoked by technologies of the imagination that generate speculation. These issues are explored in the context of changing forms of governance of the Hooghly riverine economy by bureaucrats in the Kolkata Port Trust. Through ethnography we track how public-private partnerships are forged by exemplary men, or seers, deploying divinatory action. The fortunes of business, trade, and the livelihoods of informalized workers rest on these practices, which generate short-term unstable forms of capital accumulation. Drawing on this case, we can potentially develop comparative critical approaches to the recent emergence of popularist speculators in India and elsewhere.

In this introduction, I argue that in spite of recent discussions of global and neoliberal time, the anthropology of modern time remains under‐explored. Modern time here is understood to be a complex historical product. At its centre is the abstract time‐reckoning of capitalism, which acts as a universal measure of value, but which always comes into conflict with concrete experiences of time. Its social disciplines emerge from Christian practice, but the ethics of these routines are marked as secular and universal. Its politics is founded on representations of the natural connections of communities through a homogeneous historical time. Its science and technology tightly link social, human time to external non‐human rhythms. It is important for anthropologists to reflect on modern time because our discipline has been profoundly influenced by the discoveries of its depth, secularity, and relativity. The controversies that emerged in relation to Darwin's and Einstein's insights still provide the framework for many of our theories, especially when we draw on phenomenological philosophy. In this introduction, I suggest that the key resources for overcoming this significant absence in anthropology lie in a rapprochement between Alfred Gell's epistemology of time and the approaches of Marxist political philosophers. This combination, along with an emphasis on the labour in/of time, gives rise to new questions and reveals new aspects of modern time in the present.

This paper uses an ethnography of river pilots who navigate container ships on the Hooghly to argue for a focus on labour as an act of mediation in the timespaces of global workplaces. A new approach to capitalist time is developed that seeks to combine recent emphasis on knowledge practices with an older Marxist emphasis on the mediating role of labour. Bureaucrats driven by the rhythms of repayment of public deficit have taken on an extractive role on the Hooghly, producing a declining infrastructure. Moreover, the contradictions produced by government policies are making it increasingly difficult to navigate the river, climaxing in frequent accidents. River pilots 'fix' these through technological interventions shaped by the ethics or 'senses of workmanship' that emerge from their acts of labour in specific timespaces. Capital on the Hooghly continues to circulate through these small, piecemeal moves in which time is an ethical, affective, and technical problem rather than through the large‐scale temporal fixes described by Harvey and Castree. Therefore, we need radically to rethink our approaches to time in capitalism, moving beyond existing accounts of it as an abstract measure of value or source of time‐discipline. Capitalist time is heterochronic and provokes attempts to reconcile diverse, recalcitrant rhythms and representations through our ethical and physical labour.

In this introduction, I argue that in spite of recent discussions of global and neoliberal time, the anthropology of modern time remains under-explored. Modern time here is understood to be a complex historical product. At its centre is the abstract time-reckoning of capitalism, which acts as a universal measure of value, but which always comes into conflict with concrete experiences of time. Its social disciplines emerge from Christian practice, but the ethics of these routines are marked as secular and universal. Its politics is founded on representations of the natural connections of communities through a homogeneous historical time. Its science and technology tightly link social, human time to external non-human rhythms. It is important for anthropologists to reflect on modern time because our discipline has been profoundly influenced by the discoveries of its depth, secularity, and relativity. The controversies that emerged in relation to Darwin's and Einstein's insights still provide the framework for many of our theories, especially when we draw on phenomenological philosophy. In this introduction, I suggest that the key resources for overcoming this significant absence in anthropology lie in a rapprochement between Alfred Gell's epistemology of time and the approaches of Marxist political philosophers. This combination, along with an emphasis on the labour in/of time, gives rise to new questions and reveals new aspects of modern time in the present.

This article argues for an approach to archives and documents that focusses on their material effects. It traces the impact of the East Indian Railway Nationality Files on the intimate stories of family genealogies among Anglo-Indian railway workers. The procedures of proof and record-keeping associated with these files (kept from 1927-50) displaced Anglo-Indian family histories into a public realm of state documents and archives, making these the final arbiters and guardians of their origins. Anglo-Indian workers often protested their assigned status by writing to the bureaucracy, especially as family members were regularly classed differently by distinct institutions. They sought a continuous public genealogy for themselves. Their interest in doing this and the practices of the nationality archive reveal the new conjunctions between political rights and family origins in Indian civil society. Inereasingly, both the jati of nationalists and the enumer able community of colonial bureaucrats rested on a genealogical imperative, which excluded Anglo-Indians because of their 'mixed' origins from belonging to either India or Britain. The material effects of this historical moment and the archive are visible in contemporary conversations with Anglo-Indian railway families. They tell stories of disappearing documents, of ghosts disturbed by lack of an archive, of their bodies as treacherous records of identity and of the impossibilities of being an Indian community.

Speculation structures the unprecedented breadth and depth of contemporary global capitalism. We define it as an engagement with uncertainty that aims to materialize potential futures. Studies of economization and financialization have highlighted the production of value through transparent practices of calculation and have focused on the Global North. As an alternative, we use ethnographic and historical genealogical methods to explore predictive practices that are motivated by contingency and aim to make uncertainty productive. India, a celebrated emerging market and dense arena of capitalist promise and failure, provides the foundations for our approach. The speculative practices we focus on challenge the distinction between formal and informal, the licit and illicit, because they fuel rationalized market regimes, as well as worlds of precarity. Our approach reveals the governmentalities, public cultures, and market actions that are characteristic of the present pursuit of value for profit and survival.