Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale

In a recent debate with Sarah Pink in the pages of , concerning the prospects for an anthropology that would highlight the work of the senses in human experience, David Howes objects to what I have myself written on this topic, specifically in my book (Ingold 2000). In doing so, he distorts my arguments on six counts. In this brief response, I set the record straight on each count, and argue for a regrounding of the virtual worlds of sense, to which Howes directs our attention, in the practicalities of sensing the world.

The tourist has long been a common but often demeaned figure of modern popular culture. Only from the 1970s did social scientists such as Erik Cohen, Valene Smith and particularly Dean MacCannell treat the tourist seriously as a conceptual figure. The past 40 years has seen both the proliferation of numbers and types of tourists on the move and a much more fine‐grained conceptualisation of the figure of the tourist, who can be examined in terms of both embodied performances and inner, mental voyages rather than objective classifications. Many tourists are competitive about their travel destinations, their experiences, their tastes and the care with which they treat both their hosts and the destination environment, and tourism researchers have their own moralisations, using measures of social and cultural impact and environmental sustainability. Anthropologists are challenged to apply their ethnographic research methods to these temporary sojourners, on the move, often focused on their social and bodily pleasures. Such conditions and the often cosmopolitan research milieux promote a convergence of anthropological and other social science research methods and concepts, with some productive multidisciplinary results. Anthropologists' research on ethnic tourism, trekking and rites of passage tourism, volunteer tourism, medical tourism and many other specialised forms of travel including couch surfing and philanthropy demonstrate the continuing leading position of the discipline under very different and often difficult circumstances.

The anthropology of neoliberalism has become polarised between a hegemonic economic model anchored by variants of and an insurgent approach fuelled by derivations of the Foucaultian notion of . Both conceptions obscure what is ‘neo’ about neoliberalism: the reengineering and redeployment of the state as the core agency that sets the rules and fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to realising markets. Drawing on two decades of field‐based inquiries into the structure, experience and political treatment of urban marginality in advanced society, I propose a between these two approaches that construes neoliberalism as an that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third. Bourdieu's concept of bureaucratic field offers a powerful tool for dissecting the revamping of the state as stratification and classification machine driving the neoliberal revolution from above and serves to put forth three theses: (1) neoliberalism is not an economic regime but a political project of state‐crafting that puts disciplinary ‘workfare’, neutralising ‘prisonfare’ and the trope of individual responsibility at the service of commodification; (2) neoliberalism entails a rightward tilting of the space of bureaucratic agencies that define and distribute public goods and spawns a Centaur‐state that practises liberalism at the top of the class structure and punitive paternalism at the bottom; (3) the growth and glorification of the penal wing of the state is an integral component of the neoliberal Leviathan, such that the police, courts and prison need to be brought into the political anthropology of neoliberal rule.

Abstract

Humanitarian entrepreneurs seek to do well and do good by developing goods and services that directly address the world's most intractable problems. In this article we explore the expectations built into two of their products: a point-of-care diagnostic device and a solar-powered lantern. We show how these objects materialise both a minimalist ethic of care and a maximalist commitment to universal access for health and energy. Such maximalist commitments, we propose, are fundamentally utopian. The developers of these humanitarian goods do not envision their objects as stop-gap solutions or ‘band-aids’ for entrenched systemic failures but rather as the building blocks for new kinds of universal infrastructures that are delivered through the market. We trace the work involved in scaling-up the humanitarian effects of these devices through processes of design, manufacturing and distribution. For humanitarian entrepreneurs, we argue, to fail at delivering expectations is to fail at scale.