Anthropologica

Money Lightens: Global Regimes of Racialized Class Mobility and Local Visions of the Good Life

Andrea Flores — 2024-02-14

L’argent blanchit: Régimes mondiaux de mobilité des classes racialisées et représentations locales d’une bonne vie

Andrea Flores — 2024-02-14

Crisis on the terrain of language

Monica Heller — 2024-02-14

Dirt and Debt: The Racialization of Default in Brazil

Kathleen Millar — 2024-02-14

Beginning in the early 2000s, policies and legislation aimed at financial inclusion drew millions of low-income Brazilians into the banking system for the first time. When many of these consumers were unable to keep up with credit card payments, they acquired a “dirty name”—the common expression in Brazil for default. An analysis of the historical origins and current use of this expression shows how it operates as a technology of racialization that legitimates forms of expropriation under financial capitalism. Drawing upon longstanding associations between Blackness and dirt in Brazil, the expression “dirty name” naturalizes inequalities while erasing alternative financial practices and relations in Brazil’s urban peripheries.

We Move Up Levels Together: Dignity, Transformative Marketing, and the Repurposing of Racial Capitalism

Susan Ellison — 2024-02-14

Indigenous Bolivians, especially women, are climbing the ranks of global multilevel marketing (MLM) companies like Herbalife, Omnilife, and Hinode, seeking to join Bolivia’s purportedly rising Indigenous middle class. Through MLMs, Indigenous direct sales distributors pursue a dignified life materialized in better homes, smart dressing, international travel, and the respect they receive at recruitment events. In their recruitment and sales pitches to potential buyers and downline vendors, Indigenous distributors fashion testimonials about their successes that explicitly critique existing avenues of class mobility and their racialization in two ways. First, these testimonials counter the skepticism that multilevel marketing companies face by citing a litany of false promises offered by higher education, salaried employment, and public sector jobs—avenues long heralded as the stepping stones to entwined racial and class mobility in Bolivia. They further voice their frustrations with perceived status hierarchies and organizational barriers among Indigenous merchants, highlighting their own sense of alienation from the connections and protections that have enabled the financial success of other Indigenous entrepreneurs. Second, while lodging these critiques, distributors repurpose racialization toward their own recruitment ends. As MLM distributors pursue their visions of the good life, the testimonials that Indigenous MLM recruiters craft to enable their ascent expose, rely on, and rework the bounds of racial capitalism. Ultimately, their critiques reveal how the racial partitioning that enables capitalist extraction operates through the work of direct sales.

Hopefully a Good Life: Cosmopolitan Chinese Migrant Families in Urban Italy

Grazia Ting Deng — 2024-02-14

Chinese residents have grown to be one of the most prosperous migrant groups in Italy since their mass migration from China in the 1980s. Alongside their rapid upward economic mobility, parents and children within the same families have shown generational differences in their understandings of the good life. While older generations believed that the good life means economic mobility, which is achieved through their labour and migration, younger generations’ definition of the good life, rooted in their negative experiences of racialization, is associated with social recognition. Such generational differences stem from the shifting tensions between the contested racial and national orders in association with Italy’s economic stagnation and China’s global ascendancy. Yet, both generations of these desiring subjects have manifested their own conceptions of cosmopolitan Chinese-ness to survive precarity and to aspire to a better life both economically and socially. Their family stories thus contribute to anthropological debates on how people envision their futures between hope and precarity, expectation and uncertainty, and privilege and disadvantages amid racialized class terrains, generational tensions, and geopolitical transformation of the world order.

An Escalade, a Briefcase, and Respect: Latinx Youth’s Imaginings of Middle-Class Status and a Cosmopolitan Good Life in Nashville, Tennessee

Andrea Flores — 2024-02-14

Latinx immigrant-origin youth in Nashville, Tennessee—who are poised to be the first in their families to achieve middle-class status—strive toward a cosmopolitan future of professional work and disposable income. This social and economic mobility is imagined in relation to the racialization and stigmatization of Latinx people as exclusively working-class labourers and as the objects of a Southern, white cosmopolitan gaze. Through their aspirations, youth challenge existing local and global regimes of labour, consumption, and difference. With respect to work, youth seek to remake the white professional world in ways specific to their Latinx experience. In so doing, they reclaim the value of Latinx labour. They also look to engage in specific kinds of material accumulation that, while leading to tangibly more comfortable lives individually, also make their worth visible to others. Finally, youth’s views of a future defined by their ability to cross cultures and borders repositions their ethno-racial and linguistic difference as an asset rather than a liability. Moreover, this global orientation reorients cosmopolitanism away from a position of exclusively white and elite status. Collectively, these imaginings reveal that while middle-class aspirations may reinforce a colour line of class, they also potentially remake existing racialized hierarchies of class, mobility, and cosmopolitanism.

Migrant Intimacies in the “Land of Opportunity”: Navigating Race, Class, and Status in Hong Kong’s Entertainment District

Lai Wo — 2024-02-14

Since the 1970s, Southeast Asia women have turned to outward labour migration to Hong Kong to enhance their economic livelihoods. However, while their overseas work afforded the possibility of improved material conditions back home, migrants face an array of ethnic, classed, and gendered subjugations during their temporary placements abroad. Hopeful for futures beyond domestic labour, some migrant workers engage in intimate exchanges with Euro-American expatriate men in Hong Kong’s entertainment district in Wanchai. Indeed, these relations do not entirely offset their ethnic and classed minoritization. But, becoming short-term partners, long-term girlfriends, or eventual wives provide alternative pathways for navigating their disenfranchisement as racialized labourers relegated to the city’s spatial and legal peripheries. Comparably, their expatriate male partners also conveyed their own subjective experiences of dislocation and suffering due to employment redundancy, aging, and past separations. Ethnographic research examining the intimacies forged between these two groups of foreigners in Hong Kong—Southeast Asian migrants seeking better futures, and Euro- American men healing from past employment and emotional traumas—reveal opportunities for expanded aspirational capacities, broadened orientations to the future, and alternative gendered subjectivities. This article explores how the intimacies fostered in Wanchai carve out opportunity to re-envision what might be affectively and materially possible in their futures beyond domestic labour, aging alone, and prolonged economic precarity.

Contradictory Mobilities and Cultural Projects of Afropolitanism African Immigrant Nurses in Vancouver, Canada

Maureen Kihika — 2024-02-14

I explore the relationship between social class and race, through an examination of how Black nurses enact Afropolitan cultural practices to negotiate contradictory class mobilities in Vancouver. While this paper reflexively draws from my family’s lived experiences to begin thinking through the nuances of Afropolitanism, I hone the discussion in contextual reference to the class-making practices of African-born nurses. The nurses channel Afropolitan class-making projects, through which they develop a flexibility and openness of mind that enables them to reject taking on the role of victim in their contradictory mobilities. Afropolitanism refers to “an expansive politics of inclusion that seeks to position actors as part of a transnational community of Africans of the world” (Adjepong 2021, 1), to “imbue Africanness with value” (137). Merging the literature on anti-Black racism in nursing with scholarship examining relationships between social class, race, and culture, this paper draws out the promises and pitfalls of Afropolitanism through an exploration of how African immigrant nurses—part of a growing Black Canadian middle class—grapple with contradictory mobility in Canada’s racialized terrain. It contributes to discussions of the Black middle class, in the context of a “relative newness of Black middle classes” (Rollock et al. 2012, 253).

«Néolibéracialisme» Commentaire sur le numéro thématique

Anne-Christine Trémon — 2024-02-14

The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity, by Marshall Sahlins

Juan Manuel del Nido — 2024-02-14

Unquiet Minds: Youth Anthology of Art and Poetry, by Luke Kernan (ed).

M. Mustahid Husain — 2024-02-14

Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic, by Narges Bajoghli

Zeynep Sertbulut — 2024-02-14

Je veux que les Inuit soient libres de nouveau. Autobiographie (1914-1993) ᐃᓄᓐᓂᒃ ᐃᓱᒣᓐᓇᕿᖁᔨᒋᐊᓪᓚᐳᖓ ᐃᓅᓯᕐᒥᓂᒃ ᐊᓪᓚᑐᕕᓂᖅ (1914-ᒥᑦ 1993-ᒧᑦ), par Taamusi Qumaq

Chloé Le Mouel — 2024-02-14

Procréation et imaginaires collectifs. Fictions, mythes et représentations de la PMA, par Doris Bonnet, Fabrice Cahen, Virginie Rozée (dir.)

Raymonde Gagnon — 2024-02-14

Mettre au monde. La naissance, enjeu de pouvoirs (Pérou, 1820-1920), par Lissell Quiroz

Obrillant Damus — 2024-02-14

Arctique, par Nicolas Escach, Camille Escudé et Benoît Goffin (dir.)

Laëtitia Marc — 2024-02-14