The anthropology of austerity

Abstract

This introduction posits that austerity is an instantiation of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and thus must be revisited in two ways, involving its historical and geographical rendering. First, anthropological accounts should think of austerity in the long term, providing encompassing genealogies of the concept rather than seeing it as breach to historical continuity. Second, the discipline should employ the comparative approach to bring together analyses of SAPs in the Global South and austerity measures in the Global North, providing a more comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon. We are interested in what austerity does to people’s temporal consciousness, and what such people do toward a policy process that impacts their lives. We find, in this comparative pursuit, instead of Foucauldian internalization, dissent and dissatisfaction.

The State of the Welfare State: Advice, Governance and Care in Settings of Austerity

“…Structural readjustment, neo-liberal reform and financialisation have also paved the way for a set of processes commonly known as 'austerity'. The effects of these in countries in the global south are well-known, but anthropologists have been less attentive to the way similar processes were implemented elsewhere (yet see Powers & Rakopoulos 2019). In the 2000s, austerity politics and public sector cuts were enforced by governments across much of Europe (Knight 2015;Muehlebach 2016;Forbess & James 2017;Koch 2018a).…”

“…Let us briefly consider the actual effects of austerity cuts on social welfare (rather than on 'economic growth' for which, according to many critics, austerity more generally has been ineffectual if not downright damaging). The papers in this volume tell of European states doing just what was done by those in countries in the global South (Powers & Rakopoulos 2019): moving welfare dependents 'off the books'; outsourcing their care to empathetic or entrepreneurial businesses or charities, or to fellow-sufferers; hollowing out benefits regimes; and ditching older ideas of the 'public good' in the name of welfare-to-work ideologies (Bear 2017). In the UK, for example, agencies have been scrabbling for funds and beneficiaries obliged to work full timenot because they are in employment but doing form-filling, launching online appeals against or appearing in tribunals to attempt the reinstatement of discontinued benefits (Forbess & James 2017).…”

“…And yet, much of our work militates against too monolithic a perspective. Similar to the dissidents of austerity recorded by Powers and Rakopoulos (2019), the caring labour that advisers engage in also challenges dominant logics of 'deservingness' and 'scrounging' as they provide vital servicesat once emotional, practical and ideologicalto those that the state itself has given up on or does not consider to be in need of support. In these moments, care work becomes a mechanism for implementing or imagining alternatives to the status quo, however ad hoc or fleeting these alternatives might be.…”

From social security to state-sanctioned insecurity: how welfare reform mimics the commodification of labour through greater state intervention

“…For example, when sanction rates for UC rose between 2011 and 2014 parts of the media and some of those affected by these changes pushed back against this new regime of conditionality (Watts & Fitzpatrick, 2018), and sanction rates came down. Moreover, across much of the world, social movements and actors have started calling for alternatives to the economic neo-liberalism in Britain (Robinson & Sheldon, 2019) and across other places in the global north and the global south (Bear & Knight, 2017;Knight & Stuart, 2017;Powers & Rakopoulos 2019). However, when it comes to UC, collective grassroots protests have largely been missing or only been intermittent.…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…The austerity that has prevailed across the capitalist world since the crash of 2008 was theorised by a special issue of Focaal , which powerfully highlights the global span of austerity’s icy grip: South Africa (Powers 2019); Portugal (Blanes 2019); Mozambique (Pfieffer 2019); Peru (Stensrud 2019); Italy and Argentina (Orlando 2019). Powers and Rakopoulos (2019) research the link that runs back from current austerity to its historical roots, known since Adam Smith, and echoed by Polanyi (2001) as an astringent ‘ethics of the market’, anchored deep in the heart of liberal economic theory.…”