Morality, Crisis and Capitalism: Anthropology for Troubled Times 9781800736122

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Morality, Crisis and Capitalism

Morality, Crisis and Capitalism Anthropology for Troubled Times

Edited by Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Jon P. Mitchell

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Jon P. Mitchell All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baldacchino, Jean-Paul, editor. | Mitchell, Jon P., editor. Title: Morality, crisis and capitalism : anthropology for troubled times / edited by Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Jon P. Mitchell. Description: First Edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022019384 (print) | LCCN 2022019385 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800736115 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781800736122 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Ethnophilosophy. | Philosophical anthropology. | Social change. Classification: LCC GN468 .M67 2022 (print) | LCC GN468 (ebook) | DDC 305.8001--dc23/eng/20220629 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019384 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019385 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-611-5 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-612-2 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800736115

To the memory of Paul Clough (1949–2019)

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction. Anthropology and Its Crises Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Jon P. Mitchell Chapter 1. Moralities, Engagement, Capitalism: Current Challenges for Critical Anthropology John Gledhill Chapter 2. Between Conspiracy and Catastrophe: The Political Unconscious in Malta Paul Sant Cassia Chapter 3. Crisis State of Mind: Spaces for Self-Determination in Permanently Troubled Times Daniel M. Knight Chapter 4. The Moria Catastrophe in Greece: An Anthropologically Informed Disaster Analysis of Refugee Reception in Europe Jutta Lauth Bacas

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Chapter 5. Relevance, Ethics and the ‘Good’ in Anthropology: Moving beyond the Anthropology of Crisis to the Ethical Crises in Anthropology Jean-Paul Baldacchino Chapter 6. Higher-Education Crisis, Academic Personhood and Moral Labour Matthew Doyle and James McMurray Chapter 7. Dilemmas of Sexuality in Malta: Reconciling Catholic and LGBTQ+ Identities Jon P. Mitchell

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Chapter 8. The Will to Risk: Why the Moral Economy Is Not What You Think A. David Napier

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Index

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Illustrations

Figures Figure 2.1. Temporary shrine to Daphne Caruana Galizia, opposite the Law Courts, Valletta, Malta. Photograph © Paul Sant Cassia.

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Figure 4.1. Fenced section of RIC Moria on Lesbos. Photograph © Jutta Lauth Bacas.

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Figure 4.2. Tents in Zone 7 of the ‘Olive Grove’. Photograph © Jutta Lauth Bacas.

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Figure 5.1. Diagrammatic representation of the competing frameworks of the ethical scope of anthropology organized according to Domain/Technique, Orienting Value, Relation to the Other and the respective Critiques to them. © Jean-Paul Baldacchino. 123

Tables Table 4.1. Irregular arrivals in Greece, 2014–2020.

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Table 4.2. Arrivals on Lesbos Island, 2017–2020.

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Table 4.3. Transfers from Lesbos to the Greek mainland, 2016–2020.

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Introduction

Anthropology and Its Crises Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Jon P. Mitchell

‘M

ay you live in interesting times’ was reputedly an ancient Chinese curse made famous by British MP Sir Austen Chamberlain in 1930. The premise is that ‘interesting times’ are times of upheaval, conflict and insecurity – troubled times. This ‘curse’ was chosen as the theme for the 58th Venice Biennale, in 2019. The theme was chosen to orient artists towards the ‘precarious aspects of existence today’, including threats to key traditions in the postwar order. The curator Ralph Rugoff (2019) writes how it sounds ‘uncannily familiar today as the news cycle spins from crisis to crisis’. Anthropology is no stranger to this sense of ‘crisis’. Since its early days the discipline has always been marked by a certain sense of ‘crisis’. The birth of anthropology in the early twentieth century was driven in no small part by the urgent need to document and collect records of a disappearing way of life in what became known as ‘salvage ethnography’. In America the need for such salvage was perhaps most severely felt, and indeed was institutionally sanctioned by the state’s Bureau of Ethnology. The sense of irrevocable loss of data was particularly poignant as a result of the post-Civil War migration (Gruber 1970: 1296). E.B. Tyler, Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber and others of his generation were seeking to document the Native American way of life before it was irrevocably lost. Within British anthropology Malinowski was himself ‘suggesting that authentic Trobriand Island culture (saved in his texts) was not long for this earth’ (Clifford 1988: 73). While influenced by paradigms of natural history it is important to note that this anthropology, driven by a sense of ‘imminent destruction’, ultimately

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introduced a sense of ‘profound humanism’ to the discipline (Gruber 1970). Anthropology, however, continued to be marked by this sense of urgent salvage well into the postwar era. Lévi-Strauss’ encounters in the tropics were ultimately tristes because he could also see a disappearing world, a sense of crisis and despair that continued to haunt him until his death in 2009 (Baldacchino 2009). The sense of crisis in anthropology was therefore conditioned both by the prevailing theoretical model and the actual political climate from which it emerged. Other cultures were constructed as inhabiting an ‘Other’ time, one which is both timeless (Fabian 2014) and slow to change – or ‘cold’, as Lévi-Strauss puts it. Change was something that happened to an indigenous society when it encountered the forces of capitalism and colonialism. Writing in the UNESCO Courier in 1961 Lévi-Strauss invoked a dual crisis in anthropology – on the one hand there are ‘peoples who are simply vanishing from the face of the earth’ and there are others who are ‘categorically hostile to anthropology for psychological and ethical reasons’. To address the first crisis the answer for Lévi-Strauss was not too dissimilar from that of Boas and colleagues: ‘Research must be speeded up and we must take advantage of the few years that remain to gather all the information we can on these vanishing islands of humanity’, whereas to address the second crisis Lévi-Strauss proposed opening our doors to the Other to come and study ‘us’. In the 1960s, motivated by Lévi-Strauss’ speech at the bicentennial celebration of the birth of James Smithson, the Smithsonian embarked on a research programme of ‘urgent anthropology’ driven by this sense of crisis to document disappearing cultures or those undergoing rapid change (Link 2016). Even in the 1980s, as Clifford noted, anthropology continued to be characterized by a certain sense of après moi le déluge with the exotic culture in question inevitably undergoing ‘fatal’ changes’ (Clifford 1988: 73). This anthropological ‘salvage slot’ also linked with the ‘savage slot’ identified by Trouillot (1991), in which ‘otherness’ or ‘savagery’ requires redemption, rejection or preservation. Since anthropology’s reflexive turn (See Mitchell; Baldacchino this volume) the discipline developed its critique of naïve objectivism and the literary conventions that serve to deny the coevalness of the Other. The notion of a ‘salvage ethnography’ became untenable not only because anthropologists started to distance themselves from classificatory paradigms derived from natural science but because the fact that the very knowability of our subjects was put into question: The confidence that self-closing discourse gave to Lévi-Strauss and Akobo Realism to Evans-Pritchard seems to many anthropologists less and less available. Not only are they confronted by societies half modern, half traditional;

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by fieldwork conditions of staggering ethical complexity; by a host of wildly contrasting approaches to description and analysis; and by subjects who can and do speak for themselves. They are also harassed by grave inner uncertainties, amounting almost to a sort of epistemological hypochondria, concerning how one can know that anything one says about other forms of life is as a matter of fact so. (Geertz 1988: 71)

The remedy proposed was to conceive of anthropology as a collaboration with the people it studies. Collaboration was presented as a way to render the people we study coeval. Collaborative ethnography, as discussed by Fabian, was seen as a resolution to the epistemic crisis that ‘anticipated much of what post-Writing culture anthropological revisionism sought and continues to seek’ (Johnson and Michaelsen 2008: 193). These remedies for a new anthropology are not merely methodological or epistemological. They are increasingly cast as moral or ethical imperatives – as ethnographic subjects are increasingly cast as moral subjects, whilst incursions into their lives by ethnographers are scrutinized for their potential or actual immorality/amorality. Such scrutiny is evident not only in the growth and significance of ethical review within ethnographic practice (Sleeboom-Faulkner and McMurray 2018) but also, more substantively, in a moral recasting of the very project of anthropology itself. Recent calls to decolonize knowledge – including anthropological knowledge – generate an obligation to rethink the moral underpinnings of the discipline, including its links to the colonial and postcolonial past and present (Allen and Jobson 2016; Asad 1973), but also to reconsider the nature and implications of that past and present. Colonial history is intimately intertwined with the history of the development of international capitalism. We write this Introduction at the time of the COP26 conference in Glasgow – the latest of the UN’s ‘Conferences of the Parties’ to address the global climate crisis. Among other things, this has led to debate – in parts of the UK media at least – about the capacity of capitalism to generate good in the world. Some argue that capitalism has been the only successful route to the alleviation of poverty; so much so that integration into capitalist markets – through the promotion of credit unions, artisanal entrepreneurship and other entry-points into the market – is seen as a blueprint for international development (Clammer 2017; Elyachar 2005). This faith in the market, though, has been challenged by re-emerging forms of social welfare in some parts of the ‘global South’ (Ferguson 2015) as well as scepticism about the capacity of ‘the market’ to solve the crisis of climate change – or indeed other crises. Despite the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s claims that ‘the market’ provided the vaccine solution to the

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Covid-19 pandemic, it was the part publicly funded Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, distributed not-for-profit, that was at the centre of this solution. Capitalism, especially in its late formation – of what Douglas Holmes (2010) has called ‘fast-capitalism’ – has the capacity to generate huge inequality, concentrating wealth in the hands of an increasingly small number of multi-billionaires whilst generating new forms of mass poverty. Capitalism is also a cyclical process – generating periods of prosperity and apparent stability, but also periods of crisis that are not only political and economic but also moral. Since at least E.P. Thompson’s (1971) elaboration of the concept of ‘moral economy’, scholars have emphasized the embeddedness of capitalism in morality (see also Hart and Hann 2011; Narotsky and Besnier 2014). Simoni (2016) suggests that it is in moments of crisis that we find the clearest evidence of this embeddedness (456), not only raising questions about the rationality or indifference of ‘the market’ but also highlighting the moral draw of potential alternatives to capitalism. Simoni examines the experiences and narratives of Cuban migrants to Spain, who abandoned the communist regime during the Spanish construction boom of the mid-2000s, attracted by the possibilities for living a better and more affluent life. Initially work was plentiful and earnings were high – but so was the cost of living, and when the financial crisis hit in 2007–8 unemployment and an inadequate social-welfare regime meant that any money accumulated quickly disappeared. By the time of Simoni’s fieldwork, in 2012–15 in Barcelona, the migrants were poor, disillusioned and critical of an economic system that failed to deliver on its promises of a good life. One stated that were he a young man in Cuba now, and knew how life was in Spain, he would just stay there, whilst another added, ‘with a measure of irony, “Cuba is the best country in the world to be poor!”’ (Simoni 2016: 461). Having experienced poverty under communism, and now thrown into poverty by capitalism, the moral value of the former – its ability to deliver a good life even in the toughest conditions – is seen as increasingly attractive. Narotsky and Besnier (2014) argue that in times of economic crisis we need to reconfigure our understanding of ‘the economy’, to focus not only on forms of exchange, labour relations or transactions but also on moral spheres of value and hope, in which people’s economic activities are as much rooted in ideas of what it means to live a good or successful life as in more clearly material considerations. The experience of economic and moral crisis has been mobilized in various sectors of societies across the globe. The crises that drove Rugoff’s curatorial vision for the 2019 Biennale have been felt by anthropologists themselves. In 2021 five anthropologists put forward a Collaborative Manifesto for Political Anthropology in an Age of Crises (Vine et. al 2021),

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which featured in the American Anthropology Association’s ‘news’ portal. As framed by the editors: In the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, anxieties abound about the future of humanity in the face of a diverse and interlocking set of issues that range from the climate crisis and migration to the rise of polarization and “post-truth” politics, and the increasing socioeconomic inequalities left by decades of neoliberalism. What is the role of political anthropology in this context?

The five anthropologists featured in the piece responded to the question with brief interventions. On the whole, however, there was a broad consensus to recognize the urgency of this moment, step up to the mark and stop navel-gazing. They call on the discipline to adapt methods and mindsets, and to reframe research questions, methodologies and forms for knowledge dissemination in ways that genuinely serve the world. This includes confronting the radical challenge of unveiling and undoing the destructive machinations of global capitalism … all these shifts require us to work collaboratively with other scholars and with social movements, sometimes even with powerful institutions, while maintaining a critical stance (Vine et al. 2021). In his contribution Schuller conveys the urgency of the task in no uncertain terms: ‘humanity is at the precipice of self-inflicted apocalypse’ (Vine et. al 2021). In his Humanity’s Last Stand (2021) Schuller calls for an anthropology built on radical empathy, in which it is no longer enough merely to ‘collaborate’ (pace Fabian) with the people we study but indeed we need to start acting as ‘accomplices’ in working towards a more inclusive vision of humanity. Motivated by this sense of urgency many scholars have found renewed scope in taking up the call by Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995) to work for the people we study rather than simply working with them. Contributors to this volume do not necessarily converge in their own response to these crises, but through their own work they reflect upon diverse aspects of this world in crisis and the way such ‘crises’ are experienced by the people we study. The crises of the world are not disconnected from the crises in the discipline – and indeed they have, as can be seen in Schuller’s work, led to some radical revisioning of the ethics and praxis of anthropology. As Baldacchino notes in this volume the epistemological crises in anthropology need to be read against the broader socio-economic and political contexts that emerge in the historic moment. Anthropology is itself not immune to these crises and does not exist outside them. Academia and academic research do not somehow exist in a privileged external sphere immune to the social realities of capitalism. As exploitative academic

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labour practices begin to characterize the neoliberal university (See Doyle and McMurray this volume) the profession of anthropology is increasingly called to task. In 2017 the pioneering top-ranking journal Hau came under the spotlight. Hau started as an open-access journal in 2011 published by the ‘Society for Ethnographic Theory’ with a bold call for a renaissance in ethnographic theory. Anthropology, they argued, was suffering from a sort of intellectual amnesia. Anthropologists seemed to have forgotten the innovations and insights drawn from ethnography itself. No longer were anthropologists drawing upon the knowledge in the field to innovate and develop theory that in the past had led to innovations beyond its disciplinary borders: ‘Nowadays the situation is reversed. Anthropologists take their concepts not from ethnography but largely from European philosophy – our terms are deterritorialization or governmentality – and no one outside anthropology really cares what we have to say about them’ (Da Col and Graeber 2011: x). When founded Hau was committed to an open-access publishing model in defiance of the increasing commercialization of academic publishing and the growth of capitalist models in professional teaching and research. It was founded with the intention not only to bring innovation to ethnographic theory but also to ‘making anthropology itself relevant again far beyond its own borders’, as its founding editors Giovanni da Col and David Graeber (2011: i) stated in the Foreword to the inaugural issue. In 2017, however, emboldened by the #MeToo movement a number of former and current graduate students and staff working for the journal wrote an open letter denouncing a work environment characterized by abuse of power, fraud, wage-theft, bullying, sexism and even ‘borderline sexual harassment’ (Former Hau Staff 7, 2017). This was soon followed by another letter also naming former editor Giovanni da Col as the supposed source of all the trouble. In 2018 former ‘editor-at-large’, and one of the founders, the late David Graeber, issued a public apology for not having realized the ‘signs’ while also expressing his concern that ‘HAU’s failure as an experiment in free scholarship, and its sale to University of Chicago Press, will be held out as proof that such projects aren’t viable’ (Graeber 2018). Some within the journal argued that this was all a witch-hunt that resulted from a personal feud between da Col and Graeber. Jesse Singal covered the controversy in a piece for The Chronicle, in which he makes the important point that ‘[t]he controversy, at root, wasn’t just about the journal or its editor, but also the ways in which contemporary anthropology is a morally corrupt, harmful institution in which the powerful prey upon the weak’ (Singal 2020). The issue grew to such proportions that there were also panels on the subject at the AAA

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(American Anthropological Association) conference. One of the former Hau employees ‘Dowdy’, interviewed by Singal and present at the event, expressed his dissatisfaction at how the whole affair had unfolded within anthropological circles: ‘Students and scholars are using this opportunity to air their own grievances, or, in the case of the senior faculty, what can only be called a gross attempt at building their titles as activistanthropologists, in securing that forum’ (Singal 2020). This is not the place to discuss the substance of the specific case and its merits. Suffice it to note that anthropology as a profession does not have a privileged position outside the world it inhabits. And the crises that it observes and notes in the world also form part of its own history. It remains to be seen whether, after migrating to the University of Chicago Press and the editorial board being recomposed, Hau will manage to retain its leading place in the ubiquitous ‘citation indexes’ and ‘journal rankings’ that have come to stand for the weight of scholarship. That being said the spirit behind the foundation of Hau was also, as noted earlier, engendered by a dissatisfaction with the impoverishment of anthropological theory and a sense of crises from within. While the natural sciences are no stranger to epistemic crises these are often the result of paradigmatic revolutions, in which crises lead to reconfigurations of epistemic orders (See Kuhn 1996). Anthropology on the other hand seems to have always existed in a state of indeterminacy; there has never been the same sort of epistemic surety as a result of its ‘crises’. We would dispute the notion that anthropology has a had a ‘golden age’ when its endogamous pioneering insights led the way. In many ways anthropologists were always significantly unsure about their position within the intellectual world and indeed their own future. Writing in 1926 Robert Redfeld posed the question of whether anthropology can be considered a ‘natural science’. His answer was ominous: Anthropology, therefore, although in large measure a historical science, ever and again tends to become a natural science. To what extent its contribution to a nomothetic science of human behavior will remain independent, or will become merged with other disciplines having this method and interest, remains uncertain. It is probable that for some time its important contribution will remain the collection of a wide variety of invaluable data. (Redfeld 1926: 721)

More than thirty years later the relationship between anthropology and history, as opposed to natural science, was still being debated. EvansPritchard was convinced that anthropology is closer to history than it is to social science, and indeed considered the two as ‘indissociable’ (Evans-Pritchard 1962: 65). Writing in 1990 D’Andrade, responding to

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Scheper-Hughes’ call for an activist anthropology, insisted that anthropology is above all else a science: ‘This is not an argument that anthropologists should have no politics; it is an argument that they should keep their politics separate from the way they do their science’ (D’Andrade 1995: 400). As we can see from the preceding Hau ‘scandal’, however, it is delusional to think that one can easily separate the two – after all the conditions of knowledge production are an essential part of anthropology’s politics. The ‘epistemological hypochondria’ that Geertz was referring to in the 1980s was neither new nor behind us. The specific epistemological crisis might have changed over the years (I think few still consider the thorny question to be whether anthropology is a form of history or a natural science), however anthropology has never been able to find a sure disciplinary footing beyond its call for participant observation – which is even now being claimed by other disciplines. In many ways, however, anthropology has grown and flourished in the interstitial space between disciplines. Perhaps this interstitial quality reflects its own practice wherein anthropologists exist in between cultures, becoming part of a culture and yet always remaining outside it. Innovation in anthropology has tended to emerge from encounters with other disciplines – to cite but one example the effect that linguistics has had on the development of Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology is well known. Partly fuelled by the crises of the representability of otherness anthropologists started to look towards literary studies, with the role of anthropologist as author gaining the foreground and inspiration being drawn from what Geertz called ‘faction’ (Geertz 1988) or from creative non-fiction (Narayan 2007). As the object of our enquiry started to fade from our grasp, whether with the death of ‘culture’ or indeed the very ‘otherness’ of the other as they become more and more enmeshed within our horizons (Johnson and Michaelsen 2008), anthropologists kept searching for themselves through their encounter with other disciplines. With the recent rise of an ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology even theology has found a place within the discipline. Robbins, a critic of the state of ‘suffering slot’ anthropology (see Baldacchino this volume), famously called for an engagement with theological construals of otherness. As anthropologists: we have more and more resigned ourselves simply to serving as witnesses to the horror of the world, the pathos of our work uncut by the provision of real ontological alternatives. The tropics as we portray them, wherever they happen to be, have never been so triste and devoid of ontological otherness as they are now. And the fact that we currently have to get our models of

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critical otherness back from theologians like Milbank should indicate to us something about what we have lost. (Robbins 2006: 292–93)

However, even this turn to theology is itself a result of our reaction to a perception of a world in crisis – the sense of ‘horror’ in the world. This leads to a rethinking of what it is that anthropology does – epistemological questions are profoundly moral questions that, in this case, frame what it means to be an anthropologist. Anthropology has therefore moved from a discipline grown from a sense of crisis in the world (the loss of ‘traditional society’) to a discipline itself in crisis. The chapters in this volume represent divergent perspectives but converge in their commitment to the need for anthropologists to engage with this notion of crisis and develop our own positions relative to the crises we encounter in the field. Anthropologists, however, are also keenly attuned to the ways in which crises are situated within and create their own temporalities (see Knight 2021). The question of ‘when’ is a crisis is just as important as, if not more important than, ‘what’ is a crisis. The language of ‘crisis’ can be used to create the discursive conditions required for the normalization of structural inequality. ‘Crisis talk’ can thus become a counterrevolutionary idiom in a time when ‘[c]risis talk today seeks to stabilize an institution, practice, or reality rather than interrogate the historical conditions of possibility for [its] endangerment to occur’ (Masco 2017: 73). It is certainly true that, as Masco observed in the US, ‘the configuration of the future as an unravelling slide into greater and greater degrees of structural chaos across finance, war and the environment prevails in our mass media’ (Masco 2017: 65). With the rise of right-wing nationalism from Brasilia to Rome (see Gledhill this volume), the growing numbers of displaced populations across the globe, alarming environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity, global warming, the spread of religious violence and intolerance and the overall rise in the politics of fear and hate it is hard to escape a sense of urgency and crisis in our everyday lives. Indeed, just as this volume was being brought together in 2019 the world went through yet another global crisis – which in turn prompted a new round of ‘urgent anthropology’ – the Covid-19 pandemic, and as we write this chapter, we read the letter of resignation tended by Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich and Freising, to Pope Francis over the loss of confidence in the Roman Catholic Church in the way of its ‘sexual abuse crisis’. While one can debate whether or not these crises are indeed ‘unparalleled’ or ‘unprecedented’ (We doubt it – as anthropologists, after all, drawing parallels and comparisons is our stock trade), it would be a mistake to dismiss the proliferation of crisis talk as

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purely ideological. Contributors to this volume look to the various ways in which we, as anthropologists, can respond to and understand these various crises encountered in the field and in academia itself. Taken collectively these crises can be considered not just as a challenge to our ‘cultural traditions’ and social formations but indeed a challenge to our very ‘species-being’. The concept of ‘species-being’ (Gattungswesen) has been relatively undervalued. Ultimately it is Marx’s conception of what it means to be human; as Czank notes, the concept refers to ‘the essence of humanity, the subject of Marx’s philosophy, and the basis for all things Marxist’ (Czank 2012: 318). Moral orientations borrowed from forms of humanism can no longer be taken for granted. The rise of the ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology could itself be read as a symptom of the way we live through these ‘troubled times’. As Robbins (2013) argues, one of the consequences of the reflexive auto-critique of anthropology has been a shift from the savage to the ‘suffering slot’, in which anthropologists’ attention focuses increasingly on the subaltern, the disenfranchised, the precarious or the otherwise suffering subject. This move has, he argues, blunted some of anthropology’s critical edge, which in turn can be redeemed by focusing on the ethical grounding of our informants – their evaluation and pursuit of the good. This anthropology of ethics and morality also requires us to re-evaluate the morality of the anthropological project itself. The sense of crisis in the world needs to be read through our own anthropological task. A critical anthropology therefore requires us to look at the ways in which morality and the ‘ethical turn’ itself is discursively constructed and implicated in broader enquiries into the transformations of capitalist logic and its moral economy. Chapters in this volume include ethnographic studies on the ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean, the ‘financial crisis’ in Greece and the ‘rule-of-law’ crisis in Malta as well as the crisis of violence and hunger in South America that have resulted from capitalist development in the region. Other chapters look at the way in which crises in anthropology can be read alongside the political and economic crises that emerge from the historical conditions of capitalism itself. The book opens with John Gledhill’s reflection on long-term ethnographic engagements with Latin America – Mexico, Brazil – and his mission to untangle the complexities of the region through an approach to global political economy. At the same time he emphasizes the need for non-Eurocentric accounts of global political economy, calling for anthropologists to be public intellectuals with a moral imperative to make a stand in public discourse by speaking truth to (global capitalist) power. Gledhill also emphasizes the institutional contexts of anthropological

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knowledge production. The global crisis is also a crisis of the world’s universities, as they are increasingly themselves enmeshed in the processes of global capitalism. There follow two chapters that examine the notion of crisis in different Mediterranean societies. Paul Sant Cassia examines the political and moral crisis surrounding the 2017 assassination of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. He explores local accounts of who was to blame for the murder to examine both conspiracy theories about – and the actual experience of – conspiracy, corruption and links between government and organized crime (mafia). Whilst Sant Cassia uses the ‘event’ of Daphne’s death to explore deeper patterns of the political– economic imaginary, Daniel Knight challenges the temporality – or eventedness – of crisis. He argues that the usual concept of crisis as temporary rupture, or unexpected ‘event’, in the otherwise smooth flow of history is difficult to apply to the endemic and enduring crisis in Greece following the global recession of 2009/10 onwards. Enduring austerity measures and chronic structural poverty have, he argues, made crisis a normalcy to which people have adjusted and accommodated – a state of being rather than an event of crisis. It is an instructive observation and one that might inform a more general understanding of our contemporary ‘interesting times’, in which disaster capitalism of the ‘shock doctrine’ variety (Klein 2007) seems to have morphed into a form of ‘crisis capitalism’ – itself characterized by the constant invocation, or even manufacture, of crisis as a justification for political, institutional and financial restructuring. This is true of national- or regional-scale crisis capitalism but also, again, of the contemporary university as can be seen in the chapter by McMurray and Doyle in this volume. Jutta Lauth Bacas also explores Greek crisis – this time the refugee crisis as experienced on the Greek island of Lesbos. Here a designated migrant ‘hotspot’ detention camp has also become a context for crisis as a state of being. Bacas’ chapter, though, also explores the event of the camp’s destruction by fire in September 2020. She takes this event as a kind of morality tale that implicates actors at multiple scales of analysis – from the global and the regional, to the national and municipal, to the local. All are implicated in this crisis denouement. Disciplinary crises are at the heart of Jean-Paul Baldacchino’s chapter, which charts the history of anthropology’s reflexive critique from the 1970s critique of the discipline’s colonial complicity – a process still enduring in the current calls for decolonization. He links together the recent emergence of procedural ethics regimes – which for many seem to threaten the open-endedness of the ethnographic method, and with it the integrity of the discipline – and the anthropology of moralities.

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The latter seeks to nuance and qualify the apparent moral certainties of an anthropology that had shifted its focus from the ‘savage slot’ to the ‘suffering slot’. James McMurray and Matthew Doyle focus on the institutional crisis in contemporary higher education, and the ethics of casualization within university departments. Based on a study of a UK university, their chapter demonstrates the ethical dilemmas of underpaid, under-acknowledged and marginalized, precarious teaching staff as they try simultaneously to campaign for their rights, eke out a living and discharge their duties in a way that fulfils their sense of their ethical duty to their students, their colleagues and the discipline. Jon Mitchell explores the moral dilemmas of LGBTQ+ Maltese as they negotiate a pathway between sexuality and Catholicism, which informs not only a theological landscape of sin and guilt but also a social world of stigma and shame. Mitchell locates his analysis not so much within broader world crises but, on the one hand, in crises of conscience within LGBTQ+ Maltese – to some extent his chapter is a story of life-crisis and resolution; and, on the other hand, in crisis within the broader discipline of anthropology. These crises are at once political, institutional epistemological, representational and ethical – requiring a new reflexivity and an attentiveness to the question of who represents whom within anthropological writing. The final chapter is a memoir–paean to the late Paul Clough, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Malta, to whom this book is dedicated. Clough’s presence is manifest throughout the volume, but it is David Napier’s articulation of a new theory of risk that addresses his contribution most squarely. It outlines Clough’s response to Napier’s own recasting of the nature of the immune system. In contrast to the standard Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ account of epidemiology, which figures the immune system as fundamentally defensive of the integrity of the body, Napier suggests that it actively seeks out viruses to expand its repertoire of immunity. It is ‘as much a search engine of difference as a defence mechanism’ (Napier this volume). Our bodies, then – or indeed our genes – are not so much selfish as gregarious, displaying a fundamental extroversion in our propensity to seek out and (literally) incorporate otherness. Influenced by Lévinas, and his emphasis on the foundational rooting of human selfhood in the acknowledgement and incorporation of the deep humanity of the other, Clough saw in this new epidemiology a means of recasting an understanding of humanity – and with that, anthropology – that is both representationally and ethically ground-breaking. Perhaps

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humans, like immune systems, he opined, are fundamentally motivated by a social or cultural extroversion that would see the incorporation of otherness as a strengthening rather than a weakening force. Clough was concerned particularly with how to rethink the place of refugees and other migrants, who had become a feature of Maltese society since its accession to the EU in 2004 and among whom he had begun to research. Although Clough published a provisional account of his thinking (2012), it remained to be fully developed when he was lost to us in July 2019. One of the global crises identified by Gledhill at the start of the volume is the global rise of the political right. He suggests that anthropologists should embrace the difficult prospect of ethnography among this ‘repugnant other’ (Harding 1991) to understand the dynamics and motivations of integralist, nativist and supremacist politics. It is also incumbent on anthropologists to develop theoretical frameworks that challenge the logics of exclusion inherent in right-wing politics, and Clough’s account of socio-cultural extroversion is a promising development in this direction. Our role as anthropologists requires us to engage not only with research participants and fellow scholars but also with government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other stakeholders, as well as global actors in political and economic environments. This requires an anthropology that is ‘scalable’ to different levels of analysis and attentive to the twin imperatives of a moral and ethical anthropology, and morality and ethics in the wider world of which anthropology is a part. Jean-Paul Baldacchino is Professor and currently Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Malta and the Director of its Mediterranean Institute. He has published numerous articles on the anthropology of religion, emotions, psychoanalysis and popular culture. His regional expertise is in the Mediterranean and South Korea. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Mediterranean Studies, which he formerly edited, and on the board of the Australian Journal of Anthropology. His work has appeared in Social Compass, Ethnicities, the Australian Journal of Anthropology, Korea Journal, the Asian Studies Review and The Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, among others. Jon P. Mitchell is Professor and currently Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He has published several books and numerous articles on the anthropology of religion, politics and sport. His regional expertise is the Mediterranean and UK. He is a

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member of the editorial board of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Journal of Mediterranean Studies and Etnografica (Lisbon). His work has appeared in Social Analysis, Ethnos, Identities, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

References Allen, Jarai Sinclaire and Ryan Cecil Jobson. 2016. ‘The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties’, Current Anthropology 57(2): 129–48. Asad, Talal (ed). 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Humanities Press. Baldacchino, Jean Paul. 2009. ‘In Memory of Claude-“Le Triste Anthropologue”’. Analysis 15: 185–89. Clammer, John. 2017. ‘What (If Anything) Can Economic Anthropology Say to Neoliberal Development? Toward New Anthropologies of Capitalism and Its Alternatives’, Dialectical Anthropology 41: 97–112. Czank, James M. 2012. ‘On the Origin of Species-Being: Marx Redefined’, Rethinking Marxism 24(2): 316–23. D’Andrade, Roy. 1995. ‘Moral Models in Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 36(3): 399–408. Da Col, Giovanni and David Graeber. 2011. ‘Foreword’, Hau 1(1): vi–xxxv. Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1962. ‘Anthropology and History’, in Essays in Social Anthropology. London: Faber and Faber. Fabian, Johannes. 2014. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Ferguson, James. 2015. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Former Hau Staff 7. 1997. ‘An Open Letter from the Former Hau 7’, Footnotes. Retrieved 18 February 2022 from https://footnotesblog.com/2018/06/13/ guest-post-an-open-letter-from-the-former-hau-staff-7/. Geertz, Clifford 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Graeber, David. 2018. ‘HAU Apology’, DavidGraeber. Retrieved 18 February 2022 from https://davidgraeber.org/articles/hau-apology/. Gruber, Jacob W. 1970. ‘Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology’, American Anthropologist 72(6): 1289–299. Harding, Susan. 1991. ‘Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other’, Social Research 58(2): 373–93. Hart, Keith and Chris Hann (eds). 2011. Markets and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge University Press.

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Holmes, Douglas. 2010. Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Johnson, David E. and Scott Michaelsen. 2008. Anthropology’s Wake. New York: Fordham University Press. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London: Allen Lane. Knight, Daniel M. 2021. Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen. Cambridge: Berghahn. Kuhn, Thomas. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1961. ‘Today’s Crisis in Anthropology’, The UNESCO Courier November, 12–18. Link, Adriana Halina. 2016. ‘Salvaging A Record for Humankind: Urgent Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, 1964-1984’, Ph.D. dissertation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. Masco, Joseph. 2017. ‘The Crisis in Crisis’, Current Anthropology 58(15): 565–76. Narayan, Kirin. 2007. ‘Tools to Shape Texts: What Creative Nonfiction Can Offer Ethnography’, Anthropology and Humanism 32(2): 130–44. Narotsky, Susana and Niko Besnier. 2014. ‘Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy’, Current Anthropology 55(suppl. 9): S105–S115. Redfeld, Robert. 1926. ‘Anthropology, a Natural Science?’ Social Forces 4(4): 715–21. Robbins, Joel. 2006. ‘Social Thought and Commentary: Anthropology and Theology: An Awkward Relationship?’ Anthropological Quarterly 79(2): 285–94. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 447–62. Rugoff, Ralph. 2019. May You Live in Interesting Times: Statement by Ralph Rugoff Curator of the 58th International Art Exhibition. Retrieved 20 January 2021 from https://universes.art/en/venice-biennale/2019/may-you-live-ininteresting-times. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. ‘The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 36(3): 409–20. Schuller, Mark 2021. Humanity’s Last Stand: Confronting Global Catastrophe. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Simoni, Valerio. 2016. ‘Economization, Moralization and the Changing Moral Economies of “Capitalism” and “Communism” among Cuban Migrants in Spain’, Anthropological Theory 16(4): 454–75. Singal, Jesse. 2020. ‘How One Prominent Journal Went Very Wrong’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 October 2021. Retrieved 18 February 2022 from https://www. chronicle.com/article/how-one-prominent-journal-went-very-wrong?bc_non ce=3fr89rs4k4k74vlrgl2fz6&cid=reg_wall_signup. Sleeboom-Faulkner, Margaret and James McMurray. 2018. ‘The Impact of the New EU GDPR on Ethics Governance and Social Anthropology’, Anthropology Today 34(5): 22–23. Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1971. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50(1): 76–136.

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Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. ‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness’, in Richard G. Fox (ed), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 17–45. Vine, David, David N. Gellner, Mark Schuller, Alpa Shah, Chandra L. Middleton, Gwen Burnyeat and Missy Maceyko. 2021. ‘Collaborative Manifesto for Political Anthropology in an Age of Crises’,  Anthropology News  website, 16 July 2021.

Chapter 1

Moralities, Engagement, Capitalism Current Challenges for Critical Anthropology John Gledhill

I

t is difficult for someone who has reached my age not to see crises, whether in anthropology or the world in general, as cyclical. What Bob Scholte (1978) defined as a crisis in and of anthropology had been declared on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic by the end of the 1960s, as discussed by Baldacchino in his chapter in this volume.1 Many of us who entered the profession in the 1970s kept up the pressure as critiques and counter-critiques multiplied over the following decades, even if, as Eric Wolf remarked, our tendency to continuously slay paradigms ‘only to see them return to life as if discovered for the first time’ made the discipline ‘resemble a project in intellectual deforestation’ (Wolf 1990: 588). In Mexico, the country where I did my first quarter-century of fieldwork, the phrase ‘we are in crisis’ tripped off the tongues of members of different social classes at such regular intervals that it seemed a permanent national state of mind, albeit one not lacking in observable material foundations. For orthodox Marxists, crisis in the world might have seemed positive, since each successive conjuncture would supposedly mark the maturing of cumulative capitalist and imperialist contradictions that would eventually be sublimated into universal emancipation from want, exploitation and violence. Yet although deepening capitalist contradictions and confrontation between rising and declining global powers weigh heavily on the present conjuncture, our times are ‘troubled’ by the way that earlier visions of how to construct more socially inclusive futures for humanity ceased to convince. Coming on top of an accelerating climate crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic –

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one more example of the increasingly catastrophic transformations of human relations with non-human nature that have marked the Capitalocene (Moore 2017) – made the social and ethno–racial inequality produced by current regimes of accumulation more visible, since the virus did not affect everyone equally but raised the political stakes of reshaping the future another notch. Pandemic-induced economic crisis added to existing pressures on the middle and working classes as well as those consigned to the most desperate forms of precarity in an escalating global disorder. In this sense, our multiple, intersecting, crises clearly are cumulative. In this chapter I argue that anthropology still has vital contributions to make to understanding the world in which we are living. Our antiEurocentric project seems as vital as ever, but there is much more to anthropology than that. Although both the media and some colleagues in other disciplines continue to assign anthropology to the ‘savage slot’ (Trouillot 2003), in the years since the original ‘crisis’ we have not only extended our objects of analysis in a way that leaves little beyond our scope but also radically rethought many of the assumptions that underpinned the works included in our classical canon. There is still plenty to debate, including what remains to be done to complete the discipline’s decolonization, but part of this chapter is devoted to exemplifying what a critical anthropological vision embracing both theory and practice can accomplish. Yet I will also emphasize the mounting challenges that all academic knowledge producers now face. Even before Covid-19 deepened those challenges, Western neoliberal regimes (along with an increase in competition in the global higher-education market, especially from China) had made the conditions of academic labour more precarious and transformed the public roles of university intellectuals. The authority of academic knowledge became increasingly questioned in a ‘post-truth’ environment in which alternative voices seized on the opportunities offered by digital capitalism to reach wider publics. Ultraright political movements and socially conservative religious movements have proved adept at exploiting these developments to undermine the knowledge claims of social and natural scientists alike when these prove ideologically inconvenient to them. Taking refuge in academic silos and answering only to the competitive individual performance targets of the neoliberalized university is a losing strategy in this environment. I conclude my chapter by discussing one alternative: engaging with the people we study in more collaborative ways.

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Non-Eurocentric Perspectives on Globalization and the Modern World System I spent the first twenty years of my career working in a department dominated by West Africanists, at University College London. My colleagues must have taught me something because I could at least make some sense of what happens in Candomblé terreiros in Salvador, Bahia, when I decided to start the new millennium by complementing research in Mexico with work on Brazil. Candomblé is based on African gods (orishas), but associated these deities with Catholic saints, and included Indigenous spirits called caboclos. In Brazil’s southern cities in the 1930s Umbanda added a further element from nineteenth-century France, Spiritism, appealing to working- and lower-middle-class people across ethno–racial boundaries – and in the 1960s Candomblé in Bahia was reconfigured as cultural heritage and a religion for everyone, including tourists (Prandi 2000). Nevertheless, an erudite Yoruba tradition remained central to Candomblé in Bahia, a region of ‘Latin’ America that remained connected to Africa in many different ways after Pedro Alvares Cabral made landfall there in April 1500. Those connections included Islam. It was Muslim slaves and freedmen who rose up in revolt against the government in Salvador on a Sunday during Ramadan in 1835 (Reis 1993). The Malês as they were called, from the Yoruba imale, had the advantage of being somewhat more literate than the slavocracy – and in Arabic, a language their oppressors could not easily understand. But they suffered the disadvantage of having fewer guns and no cavalry. The revolt was crushed and many of the survivors deported back to West Africa, but, with the Haitian revolution still fresh in Brazilian elite minds, the anxieties that the Malês generated started the new nation on its long march away from slavery and there were still over 100,000 Muslims in Brazil at the start of the twentieth century. One widely acclaimed contribution to the anthropological task of stripping out the residual Eurocentrism that remained present even in critical Marxist accounts of the development of the capitalist world system was the long-term research on indigenous logics of accumulation and distinctive moralities underpinning class stratification and gender relations that Paul Clough pursued in Hausaland (Clough 2009; 2014). In showing that other social logics continued to govern the economic life of some regions of a world transformed by capitalist globalization, Clough reminded us that there was more at stake than defending anthropologists’ claims to be able to offer more nuanced accounts of the ‘local’. He did not present the ‘local’ as a closed social world insulated from wider

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historical processes but went further than that in two ways. Firstly, he deployed a comparative perspective within his study region to understand why not all ‘locals’ followed the same trajectories at any given historical moment. Secondly, his analysis of indigenous social stratification did not follow the fashionable tendency to present the ‘non-capitalist’ as inevitably constituting ‘resistance’. Clough’s approach remains important for contemporary debates about the social significance of economic growth in Africa. It in no way impedes us from understanding the ways that financialized neoliberal capitalism inserts itself into the social life of many Africans, explored in Deborah James’ analysis of the growth of lower- and middle-class debt amongst black South Africans (James 2014). Yet recognizing social embeddedness remains important for analysing the impacts of the new financial technologies that that kind of capitalism is promoting, as Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Bill Maurer (2019) have argued. The local social effects of digital payment systems are context specific. In some cases, they may strengthen interpersonal connections and even create new ones by facilitating resource sharing within kinship and social networks. In other cases eliminating the need for physical contact may have the opposite effect, and weaken ties. Yet weakening some ties might actually strengthen others, by, for example, giving women’s networks greater autonomy from those of men and giving women new opportunities to subvert the control of male elders over their choice of marriage partners. Another point that Rodima-Taylor and Maurer make is that digital payments technologies will not eliminate the functions of local intermediaries – the shopkeepers, part-time retailers and other local agents who provide credit and redistribute the migrant remittances that pass through informal transnational banking systems. Behind the apparent impersonality of digital payment systems social agents continue to play a role in the way that people use the flow of money to create and sustain their social relationships. The need for a socially embedded perspective is equally clear in the case of transnational relations embedded in capitalist globalization. To return to the Brazilian case, most of that country became entangled in informal trading systems that established connections with Asia as well as Africa, as small traders moved commodities between these regions under the radar of state regulation. This is what Gordon Mathews, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Carlos Alba called ‘globalization from below’ (Mathews, Ribeiro and Alba 2012). These networks are distinct, though not always completely insulated, from the transnational networks of organized crime that blur the boundaries between the legal and illegal economies in different ways, because of the role of ‘legitimate’

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companies in moving contraband merchandise and that of international banks in laundering money (Nordstrom 2007). In the Africa–Asia–Brazil circuit, traders, mostly women, move Chinese-made consumer electronics and Brazilian cosmetic goods, such as natural hair attachments, from sites where they are cheaper to places where their prices are higher (Gomes Vaz and Hita 2018). One thing that makes this trade distinctive is that we need to understand how traders build networks of support amongst each other, and with Brazilians, in places like São Paulo. We also need to understand the family circumstances of, for example, the wife of a low-ranking African public official in Angola or Guinea Bissau who devotes herself to this business, along with the social organization of her distribution network and regular clientele back home. Yet not only does embeddedness remain important, but we are also looking at less visible dimensions of the capitalist world economy itself. The commodities being traded are often products made in capitalist factories whose markets are extended globally without cost to themselves by these humble ‘bag carriers’. We are also looking at how some of the contradictions of African governmental systems in the wake of structural adjustment were alleviated. In a similar vein, Rebecca Galemba’s studies of illegal cross-border trading between the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and Guatemala showed how that helped the region cope with the negative impacts of neoliberal economic policies and extractive transnational capitalism (Galemba 2012). Although things changed for the worse after US President Donald Trump used the threat of trade sanctions to compel Mexico to turn its own southern frontier into a US border wall, deporting most new arrivals from its national territory, a highly organized transborder informal economy whose rules and tax regime were set by local people was originally tolerated precisely because it solved problems for the national state. This is not to say that its social consequences represented an ideal world. Fewer people wanted to be schoolteachers when they could provide for their families much better by retailing contraband or participating in smuggling corn across the border at the right time of year. Not only did some people inevitably do better than others out of this system, but ‘globalization from below’ coexisted with transnational criminal networks that trafficked not only arms and drugs but also migrants and refugees from Central America in sex work and other forms of modern slavery (Gledhill 2015). Keeping the two networks separate was not always possible since the criminal organizations had the capacity to suborn local governments and infiltrate the security services, including the military. Yet doing ethnography in the margins of the institutionalized capitalist world system offers insights into socially

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embedded economic logics and distinctive moral constructions of what is of value that we would otherwise not recognize. I used the role of Islam in the 1835 Bahian slave rebellion to illustrate the limitations of a Eurocentric view of the making of the modern world. The Orientalism that was the structural counterpart of the historical construction of ‘the West’ has again become central in today’s ‘troubled times’, manifest in the European ultraright’s racialization of a Muslim ‘other’ as an existential threat to an imagined community of ‘whiteness’ (de Genova 2015). Since ‘the war against terror’ has allowed the crude grand narrative of Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis to regain political traction (Huntington 1993), it seems essential to ground critical analysis of counterinsurgency strategies in context-specific explanations of the initial social appeal of Islamist movements and the dynamics of their subsequent development. In Paul Clough’s main field site, conversion from the Indigenous Maguzawa religion to Islam was relatively recent, beginning in the 1950s and not complete until the 1980s – at which point an original eclecticism began to be challenged by the Yan Izala reformist movement that swept over all of northern Nigeria (Adesoji 2019). Yan Izala was a Salafist movement, aiming to purify Islam of all foreign influences by adopting a literalist reading of the Holy Books as a basis for the practice of living. Its rise reflected local rejection of the more flexible Sufi Islam of Nigeria’s Muslim elite. One of Izala’s spiritual leaders was the teacher of Mallam Yusef, who founded Boko Haram in 2002 and took many Izala members with him. Pérouse de Montclos (2012) argues that Boko Haram’s evolution from an anti-establishment and anti-state movement to an organization deploying terror was more a product of the brutality of state repression than contact with an international jihadist network. Nevertheless, Boko Haram, whose name means ‘Western Education is Forbidden’, extended its influence into Cameroon, Niger and Chad, and then split into two factions in 2016, of which the biggest secured recognition by Islamic State. The insurgency has not been ended by a decade of counterinsurgency war estimated to have cost 30,000 civilian lives and forcibly displaced more than four times that number of people, not to mention billions of foreign-aid dollars. Given the role of the state in Boko Haram’s rise, we cannot be surprised by this failure. Orientalist Eurocentrism has made the West’s take on political Islam more rather than less homogenizing over time, but it also ignores some interesting intercultural encounters. For example, a Muslim community was founded in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas by Spaniards who set up a furniture factory and an NGO that ministered to people expelled by the indigenous oligarchy that ruled the anthropologically

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well-researched community of San Juan Chamula. Chamula is a tourist destination because of its devotion to a syncretic saint cult that names itself ‘traditional religion’, although tourists generally remain unaware that Chamula’s public rituals focus on scorning non-indigenous outsiders (Gossen 1999). Chamula’s oligarchy was traditionally loyal to Mexico’s post-revolutionary ruling party. Religious dissent often expressed a political dissent related to the inequalities between the elite in the municipal centre and the rest of the population. In more recent years, inequality has been reinforced by the role of leading community members in the illegal economy, visible in the architecture of their houses in Chamula centre and reflected in shooting incidents in the poor districts of the urban periphery of San Cristóbal where much of the displaced population lives. Most of the displaced became Evangelical Christians rather than Muslims, but in both cases we need to understand the political economy and politics driving these changes of religious affiliation and embrace of alternative frameworks of personal and collective morality without neglecting the meaningfulness of the different religious experiences from the actors’ point of view. Secular neoliberalism is arguably a ‘thin’ ideology but neoliberalism acquires greater apparent moral substance when it is embedded in certain kinds of Evangelical Christianity, a global religious movement as varied in its orientations as Islam. On the one hand, evangelical churches may offer egalitarian messages that challenge racial and gender hierarchies, which is relevant to both indigenous Mexico and black Brazil (Burdick 1999). On the other hand, the Comaroffs described the prosperity theology of the transnational Brazilian neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God as ‘Pentecostalism meets neoliberal enterprise’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 314). The Universal Church offers the faithful a promise of immediate delivery from health problems and improved standards of material life in return for embracing Christ, exorcizing Satan and sacrificing all the money that they can to the Church, which is generally more than they can really afford. It is profitable enough to stick its glossy propaganda through the letterbox of my house in Manchester, suggesting I buy its healing oils from the Holy Land and go to see the heavily subsidized biopic of its founder Edir Macedo at my local cinema. Macedo is a billionaire who built a replica of the Temple of Solomon in São Paulo, and his nephew and fellow bishop, Marcelo Crivella, became Mayor of Rio de Janeiro. His Church’s national television network, Record, backed ultraright candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s successful presidential campaign in 2018. In doing so it promoted an authoritarian government that promised ultraneoliberal economic reforms, modelled on Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship;

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vowed to eliminate bureaucratic and legislative barriers to unfettered natural-resource exploitation; offered impunity to police, soldiers and paramilitary militias who kill; and ‘defended the family’ against tolerance of homosexuality by all means necessary, including censorship of the arts and cinema and efforts to control what is taught in school classrooms. Evangelicals are prominent in the ranks of Bolsonaro’s ministers and lower-ranking officials appointed by his government, along with a number of military men that is without precedent since the dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 until 1985. The Universal Church is Brazilian but reaches across the Atlantic. So do the conservative US evangelical networks responsible for harassment of medical staff and vulnerable young women by their British followers at my local abortion clinic in Manchester. Screaming ‘child killers’ at nurses and patients is ‘troubling’ enough under any circumstances, but was especially so in the case of a ten-year-old, poor and black, Brazilian girl raped by an uncle, whose ordeal was extended by the refusal of her home-town doctors to perform the abortion that Brazilian law permits in such cases. Hate politics and xenophobia are also propagated through transnational networks. The resurgence of the ultraright in both Europe and the Americas is fuelled by a financialized and rentier-orientated capitalist system. Diminished prospects of intergenerational mobility have been combined with heightened wealth concentration, and basic social reproduction has become increasingly challenging for those at the bottom of an ‘uberized’ labour market. The relationship is, however, mediated. The first mediating factor is the legacy of colonial racial hierarchies, expressing itself in a politics of resentment directed at immigrants and liberal multiculturalism. In its most extreme form, this latter-day ‘(re) invention of the white race’ (Allen 2014) fuels conspiracy theories about globalized capitalist elites ‘replacing’ white people with immigrants. The second mediating factor is a collapse of confidence in liberal democracy reflecting the failure of neoliberalized social-democratic parties to produce sustainable economic alternatives, given that the temporal perspective of electoral politics is as short term as that of capitalist finance. Although there is growing awareness that climate-change tipping points are getting closer, polarization and crisis in politics does not encourage optimism about governmental responses – and climate change is also a major driver of South–North migration. Neoliberal solutions to capitalist problems have produced different kinds of governments, some more socially inclusionary than others. Crises in ‘politics as usual’ can produce new multi-class popular insurgencies. But whilst in 2019 Chileans took to the streets to protest against a neoliberal order imposed on them by

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dictatorship and reproduced by a weak democratic constitution, Brazil was moving back to the Chilean past with only muted protests. Bolivia experienced a coup led by US-supported ultraright forces opposed to the empowerment of the country’s Indigenous majority and as willing as their Brazilian peers to abandon national resource sovereignty, which led to the temporary exile of the Movement for Socialism’s presidential candidate, Evo Morales, although they were defeated after new elections in 2020 resulted in a convincing majority for the Movement for Socialism’s new candidate, former Economics Minister Luis Arce. Europe and the United States as well as China are developing digital technology to perfect the surveillance society. As Wolfgang Streeck (2016) argues, authoritarian tendencies are visible everywhere in efforts to dampen resistance to growing capitalist disorder. Since it is difficult to predict where the world is heading on the basis of traditional models, our ‘troubled times’ offer anthropologists opportunities to build on the new knowledge produced by our deep immersion in specific processes and contexts. One problem is that some especially troubling developments are challenging to study ethnographically. Another problem is the growing number of ways in which we are constrained by the conditions of our own academic professionalization.

High-Risk Research It is possible to conduct ethnographic research on ultraright politics, even if doing so presents ethical challenges. Hilary Pilkington’s ethnography of the English Defence League offers a good example in terms of both results and reflection on ethical issues (Pilkington 2018). I had to grapple with the same kinds of issues myself in my early research on Mexico, in a region where peasant communities had been murderously divided between families supporting agrarian reform and families that supported social movements aligned with the conservative wing of the Catholic Church in what became the Mexican variety of fascism. That was history, but it was recent and still left marks on social relationships. It is much more difficult to undertake ethnography on violent terrorist networks, even if a university ethics committee would be willing to approve such a project. Yet studies using other methodologies suggest that if we want to understand why, within Europe, terrorist cells killing in the name of Islam form in some cities and not in others, we need to look at local chains of contact connecting particular people (Vidino, Marone and Entenmann 2017).

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Criminal and paramilitary groups are another category of social actors that ethics committees are likely to find too hot to handle. I have been asked not to knowingly speak to anyone involved in criminal activities and told that I had a duty to report anyone I suspected to the relevant local authorities. After decades of research in the ‘cartel land’ of the western Mexican state of Michoacán I found it difficult to grasp how anyone could imagine that the ‘local authorities’ were not controlled by, or indeed members of, whatever cartel was hegemonic at the time. In less troubled times it was not impossibly dangerous to undertake ethnography in this region, but essential to adopt risk-minimizing strategies that often involved talking to actors connected to the world of crime. Mexico has a lower national homicide rate than Brazil. Most killing in Mexico is linked to the drug cartels, directly or indirectly, although one of the ironies of Brazil is that homicide rates fell in São Paulo after governance of the urban periphery fell into the hands of a single criminal organization (Feltran 2008), and criminal governance had similar effects in other cities subsequently. This does not make criminal governance desirable, since it involves its own forms of violence, but poorer Brazilians often see it as the lesser of two evils in comparison with the violence and abuse that they experience at the hands of a militarized police force (Machado da Silva and Leite 2007). Similar considerations apply in Mexico. In Michoacán, state violence and extortion were always as much of a problem as competition between cartels. Researchers had to be prepared for traumatic experiences. The problem today, however, is that local criminal groups and armed community self-defence forces have become fragmented, alliances between fragments are constantly shifting and violence is increasingly grotesque.2 Unpredictability increases the risk of researchers finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if their research has nothing to do with crime or violence. Yet it is even more important to consider the risks that talking to researchers can pose for the people they are studying under these conditions. This does not mean that anthropologists should desist from studying the difficult situations in which large numbers of human beings are forced to live. Finding out how people navigate life and sustain social relations in those situations is important for what it tells us about the kind of moral reasoning they adopt, and the kinds of compromises they have to make, when the only options are deciding whether the state or the criminals are the lesser of two evils or at least more predictable in their likely actions – judgements that can shift in one direction or the other and back again over time. It is often possible to do that without direct contact with violent criminals. It is, however, necessary to assess risk seriously in advance and during fieldwork, and also to ask whether

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the risks, including risks posed to research subjects, can be justified in terms of likely results (Vallentin Hjorth Boisen 2018). Nevertheless, since university institutions need to protect themselves from legal action, they are increasingly unwilling to allow their staff and students to take risks. This was the experience of Ruben Andersson, whose first book offered an ethnographic study of the physical and virtual borders of Fortress Europe in Africa (Andersson 2014). In his second monograph, No Go World, Andersson (2019) explains how he had travelled around Mali and made friends there before he became an anthropologist, and wanted to go back to look at the work of international development practitioners, peacekeepers and NGO workers in a country now torn apart by civil war. His institutional risk assessment was not favourable to his Plan A for research. He responded with a Plan B focused on interviewing his subjects as they hunkered down in the safest spaces that they could still find in the capital, Bamako, although he included the experiences of people whose work obliged them to venture northwards. Ironically, the place that a military officer from Andersson’s native Sweden had previously recommended as the best bet for security in Bamako, the fortified and guarded Radisson Hotel, was itself stormed by heavily armed jihadists in 2015 shortly after peacekeepers fired into a crowd protesting against all forms of international presence in the country, including aid workers. Despite the restrictions imposed, Andersson succeeded brilliantly in charting the consequences of entangling international aid and development work in Western security preoccupations and the terrible difficulties faced by the badly paid and badly equipped African soldiers, who became the main ‘boots on the ground’ of Western interventions that otherwise tend to rely on drone strikes.

From Methodology to Engagement Restrictions on ethnography place some limitations on an anthropological approach, but anthropology should not be reduced to ethnography. Like Keith Hart (2004) and Tim Ingold (2008), I think that anthropology’s mission should be defined by a cross-cultural comparative method that is always implicit in our thinking even when we are writing about a particular place. Anthropology’s place in the social sciences depends heavily on our capacity to look at the global system from perspectives that ‘provincialize Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2009), but anthropology is not only a social science. Using humanities approaches to depicting human experience, including visual media and literature, can be particularly useful in communicating with non-academic audiences, including the

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people we study, and we need to employ a variety of methodologies to cope with the different scales of analysis often needed to answer our research questions. Yet there are issues for which a more rigorous, ‘scientific’, approach is necessary if we want to convince non-anthropologists that we have something to contribute to multidisciplinary and public-policy debates. This is not an argument about quantitative versus qualitative methods, but some arguments benefit from the support of numbers and are more convincing if we collect longitudinal data on meaningfully large numbers of people in proportion to the size of our study populations. A cautionary tale is offered by the concept of ‘the culture of poverty’ that Oscar Lewis abstracted from ethnographic material that told a more nuanced story, after it was appropriated by the political right to produce racialized explanations for poverty in the USA and ‘blame the victim’ models of the ‘underclass’ as a social problem. Such arguments ascribed minority behaviours to entire sociological reference groups. This remains a problem. The justifications given for the extermination of young black men in Brazilian favelas and the killing of civilians by security forces in rural Mexico are the same: these are places where everyone is ‘involved in crime’. Yet it is not difficult to show that only a minority of people who live in these places participate in crime, and that there are escape routes even for some who do get involved. Quantitative approaches do not stop us from exploring the richness of thick descriptions of social process and individual life histories. Combining methods generally pays dividends. I was privileged to interview elderly men who had emigrated from Mexico to the United States before the Great Depression began in 1929. The entire region in which they were born was controlled by one of the largest capitalist estates in the country. The absentee landlords did not allow children to attend school, so many of these early migrants were children who jumped on a freight train going north. The US authorities in the 1920s often put them into school if they made it across the Rio Grande, something of a contrast with the cruelty inflicted by the Trump administration on immigrant children in US detention centres. My interviewees told revealing, stereotype-challenging, life stories, which were engaging simply as stories. Yet since this was only one historical phase of changing patterns of migration from the biggest sending region of Mexican migrants to the United States, I started building a database structured around a series of key variables to complement my life-history interviews. Although my database started life as an attempt to adopt a ‘scientific’ approach, the idea of charting a central, historically long-standing,

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aspect of local social life appealed to many of my research subjects themselves, some of whom voluntarily helped me to fill in gaps. This experience, along with being allowed to participate in all kinds of community meetings, encouraged me to undertake field research in a more collaborative way that aimed to give the people that I was working with opportunities to participate in shaping the issues the research explored as well as opportunities to discuss my analyses before I offered them to a wider audience. Working on these lines raises questions about who we do anthropology for, and what we hope to achieve by doing it. If the level of risk that is acceptable in research should be proportional to the likely value of its results, one measure of that is contribution to knowledge about the breadth of human possibilities or informing policy, but another is its value to our research subjects themselves. There have been many calls for anthropology to become more ‘political’ and ‘engaged’ with social problems. As Charles Hale (2006) conceded, academic writing can be engaged simply by ‘speaking truth to power’ – but he and his students were not entirely satisfied by that, and their department at the University of Texas at Austin became associated with ‘activist’ anthropology. There are, however, different ways of being ‘activist’ in practice. Few, if any, anthropologists promote a romantic notion of ‘advocacy’ that completely eschews the critical distance necessary to understand complex situations in which there is no simple line to be drawn between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, and ‘the oppressed’ manifest divisions amongst themselves. On the other hand, people who work for NGOs promoting neoliberal agendas of which other kinds of activists disapprove are also being ‘activist’ in their own way. Much traditional ‘applied anthropology’ had noble liberal motives, even if it also deserved to become subject to decolonizing critiques and accusations of class, racial and gender bias. Some forms of advocacy that can be helpful to people depend on anthropologists claiming professional expertise, such as giving expertwitness evidence on behalf of refugees and asylum seekers in legal hearings or in support of land claims. Yet we can also consider broader kinds of engagement than writing a report and standing up in court, working with communities and encouraging our students to do the same. Breaking down ethnic barriers fostered by more powerful social actors is something with which anthropologists can engage in virtually any region of the world. What brings different kinds of practical engagements together is a desire to produce a ‘public anthropology’ rather than simply an academic one.

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Public Intellectuals in the Neoliberal University and ‘Post-Truth’ World There are two major barriers to practising a ‘public anthropology’ today. Although anthropology survived the period of postmodernist self-questioning about whether we can produce any knowledge at all,3 the first of these is our academic professionalization within universities governed by a neoliberal logic that pits individual scholars and institutions against each other in a game of ‘competitive accountability’ based on audit and evaluation that has financial consequences (Watermeyer 2019). The latest book by that indefatigable promoter of ‘public anthropology’, Robert Borofsky, emphasizes the perverse consequences of ‘publish or perish’ as well as the disciplining role of performance evaluation, and at the same time called for a more ‘scientific’ approach (Borofsky 2019). Yet Borofsky ends his book by taking a positive view of the opportunities that the impact assessments of the UK Research Excellence Framework (the REF) provided for telling convincing stories about how anthropology engages with real people’s lives in a constructive way. Watermeyer, in contrast, argues – on the basis of his personal experience as an evaluator, and research on the experiences of fellow evaluators and the evaluated – that what counted in impact assessment was the elegance and plausibility of the narratives offered, given that the absence of clear criteria discouraged attempts to make a rigorous evaluation of the claims made in them. To judge from discussion at the 2019 annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists, many of my colleagues include impact assessment in their long list of complaints about the burdens of audit culture. Watermeyer’s overarching conclusion is that ‘competitive accountability’ is antagonistic to ‘public intellectual’ activity by academics. Others complain that anthropology has become hopelessly fragmented by subfield specialization and that nobody writes books like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History anymore (Ribeiro 2018). The late David Graeber exemplified the continuing possibility of transcending these constraints, both through his activism and publications such as his book on debt (Graeber 2011). His untimely passing was mourned by non-academic publications as diverse as the socialist Jacobin magazine and The Financial Times. Yet even writing more ambitious books directed to a wider public may not entirely solve today’s professional challenges, since the second barrier to practising ‘public anthropology’ effectively is the emergence of a ‘post-truth’ environment. In that environment all kinds of people project themselves as intellectuals on YouTube, and Google’s algorithms seamlessly direct their

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audiences to other like-minded projects. This has proved a great asset to today’s ultraright. Ideas diffused through social media based on zero or false evidence demonstrably have bigger impacts on non-academic publics than the stories anthropologists tell REF assessors. One example is the epidemiological impact of declining child vaccination. The accelerating deforestation of Amazonia under the Bolsonaro government in Brazil will have planetary consequences, and opening up the region to unfettered capitalist exploitation posed an existential threat to Brazil’s indigenous people even before the pandemic struck. Yet within Brazil, squadrons of digital trolls and bots with ‘dark money’ behind them provided effective support for an ecocidal and genocidal government. Bolsonaro allowed some of his ministers to be nominated by his own intellectual ‘guru’, ultraright autodidact Olavo de Carvalho, a Brazilian patriot who preferred to live in Arizona and defender of ‘Judaeo-Christian Civilization’ who, according to his estranged eldest daughter, took his family to live in a Muslim alternative community so that he could practice polygyny (Segalla 2018). De Carvalho sold books via Amazon and delivered lectures via YouTube. His ideas have had impact across the class spectrum amongst Brazilians who derive ‘knowledge’ principally from the internet. They include the claim that anthropogenic climate change is a fake idea propagated by a global ‘cultural Marxist’ conspiracy, along with a moral decline resulting from teaching that gender is socially constructed. In order to defend its ‘moralizing’ project the Bolsonaro government adopted a combination of budget cuts and public denigration aimed at silencing the grounded truths produced by natural as well as social scientists in public universities, responsible for most high-quality research carried out in the country. Bolsonaro’s refusal to ‘follow the science’ in responding to Covid-19, which he described as ‘a little flu’ (gripezinha), lost his government two health ministers in 2020 – replaced by a soldier with no relevant experience. Command of the agency responsible for awarding grants to postgraduate students and evaluating research was handed over to a former private-university rector who promotes the creationist paradigm of ‘intelligent design’. Schoolteachers faced persecution if they allowed their classes to debate ideas that ran counter to the ideology of a government whose ministers felt no obligation to support arguments against their enemies with evidence and frequently resorted to demonstrable untruths. Yet although attacks on public education provoked the largest street demonstrations against the government during its first year in office, six months later Bolsonaro’s approval ratings were rising. They continued to rise in 2020 as the Covid-19 death toll passed 100,000, after his government provided emergency cash transfers to help poorer workers cope with the pandemic. Yet by the final months of 2021,

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with total deaths now exceeding 600,000, only a minority of Brazilians still declared support for a government that a parliamentary inquiry judged criminally responsible for the avoidable deaths caused by its mismanagement of the pandemic. Brazil may be an extreme case, but it is not simply ultraright movements that undermine tolerance. After British Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared Muslim women wearing burkas with ‘letterboxes’ and ‘bank robbers’, there was a measurable spike of hate crimes against Muslim women on Britain’s streets. Perhaps anthropologists should spend a little less time complaining about the burdens of academic life and a little more getting angry in public about issues that are central to what we stand for?

Conclusion: Beyond Speaking for Others Engaged anthropology is not, however, necessarily a matter of us doing the talking. The famous non-Indigenous leader of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico – Subcomandante Marcos – was sometimes accused of ‘ventriloquizing’ Indigenous people. I decided to explore the ‘autonomy’ of an Indigenous community on the Pacific Coast of Michoacán with an extraordinary history of defending its territory and system of religious and secular self-government. The subcomandante later went to visit them and was asked if he could prove he really was a revolutionary fighting for Indigenous rights rather than an agent provocateur of the state. After all, a questioner pointed out, ‘we’ve suffered five hundred years of trickery and deceit’. He might have mentioned two serious attempts at genocide as well. For once in his life, the sub was temporarily lost for words. Working in this place required me to convince a community assembly that they should allow me to be the first outsider to live in the community since 1928, which I could only do by fully explaining and justifying my research plan – after which I was allowed to undertake participant observation of future assemblies. The community faced a battle against transnational mining interests suspected of employing cartel gunmen to kill community leaders. Indigenous resistance was eventually successful, but at a heavy cost in Indigenous lives. I documented all that but I also documented this community’s rich postcolonial religious culture, which proved central to explaining its extraordinary resilience in comparison with its neighbours once I had managed to reconstruct the history of the region since the Spanish invasion. Internal factionalism existed, some findings did not go down well and I had to spend time arguing about issues as well as finding documentation, but

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my efforts were generally deemed useful. This kind of engagement, then, consists of putting specific professional skills and a body of accumulated anthropological and historical knowledge at the service of people who strongly reject any attempt to be spoken for. My more recent work in Brazil, carried out in partnership with Maria Gabriela Hita and her students at the Federal University of Bahia, is a different kind of collaboration. Our research team became a founding member of a community organization that sought to bring together all the frequently conflictive types of organizations that operated in a large irregular settlement on the urban periphery of Salvador. Inspired by the pluralistic and participatory ideals that were supposed to guide the World Social Forums, it was baptized ‘The Permanent Forum of Social Entities of Bairro da Paz’. A shared aim was to bring government to account and demand improvements to basic services and infrastructure, along with an end to public security policies that selectively – and, all too often, lethally – targeted young black men. The Forum sought to change the terms of negotiation, not only by ensuring that ‘the community’ would speak with one voice – transcending divisions based on political and religious affiliations, socio-economic differentiation, skin tone and gender – but also by presenting demands transparently in public meetings controlled by community members and not by outside authorities. This broke with established practices of ‘popular participation’ even when government did not simply resort to co-opting a leader to represent a non-existent ‘popular consensus’ that suited its own objectives. As Forum members speaking in the internal debates that set the agenda for public meetings and produced diagnostics of community problems, we made the results of our research in this poor neighbourhood relevant to what its leaders needed to show in order to press their demands for desired government interventions and resist undesirable ones, provided logistical support and injected our knowledge of how different levels of government and their bureaucracies worked into discussions of tactics and strategy. We thus acted as a kind of mediator between factions and the community and the state, but one that was unambiguously on the side of community residents. This kind of work, and the Forum itself, had its ups and downs, but undertaking ethnography that reveals contradictions within popular social movements is a different kind of exercise politically when it is done for the movement itself and when other participants can answer back. This project was also about training undergraduate and postgraduate students. Most of our students had similar social backgrounds to the people of the community and one of my undergraduate research assistants was from Bairro da Paz itself. They received modest grants

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but struggled to maintain themselves in university. Our way of working owed much to Paulo Freire’s vision of the educational process and participatory action research, another legacy that Bolsonaro sought to discredit. It could be seen as a model for engagement in ‘The South’ that comes from ‘The South’. Different contexts require different forms of engagement. It is important that anthropologists also work on upper and middle levels of the social hierarchies of the current global system as well as inside the institutions that wield the most power within it. Nevertheless, however we ‘engage’ in these troubled times the case for taking anthropology out of its professional silo seems to me to be unanswerable. John Gledhill is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and a fellow of the British Academy and Academy of Social Sciences. He has conducted ethnographic and historical research in Brazil and Mexico. His most recent books are La cara oculta de la inseguridad en México (2017); The New War Against the Poor: The Production of Insecurity in Latin America (2015); (editor) World Anthropologies in Practice: Situated Perspectives, Global Knowledge (2016) and (editor, with Maria Gabriela Hita and Mariano Perelman) Disputas em torno do espaço urbano: processos de [re]produção/construção e apropriação da cidade (2020).

Notes  1. Intense debates over theory, epistemology, methodology and the politics of anthropology also emerged within academic communities outside the English-speaking world at the end of the 1960s, the specific nature and stakes of which need to be understood in their national and regional historical contexts, although they also had international dimensions.  2. Disturbing trends include increased killing of children as well as femicides of women reduced to ‘disposable’ objects of masculine pleasure, although another dimension of that Latin American epidemic is the problem men face in finding dignified work.  3. I would not deny the positive aspects of the calls for self-reflexivity associated with the postmodern turn in anthropology, but agree with Matthew D’Ancona (2017) that postmodernism contributed to the emergence of today’s ‘post-truth’ environment.

References Adesoji, Abimbola O. 2019. ‘Boko Haram and the Global War on Terror’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics November, 1–20. Allen, Theodore W. 2014. The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. London and New York: Verso Books.

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Andersson, Ruben. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.   2019. No Go World: How Fear is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Borofsky, Robert. 2019. An Anthropology of Anthropology. Is It Time to Shift Paradigms? Kailua, HI: Center for a Public Anthropology. https://books. publicanthropology.org/an-anthropology-of-anthropology.html Burdick, John. 1999. ‘Why Is the Black Evangelical Movement Growing in Brazil?’ Journal of Developing Areas 33(3): 311–32. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Clough, Paul. 2009. ‘The Impact of Rural Political Economy on Gender Relations in Islamizing Hausaland, Nigeria’, Africa 79(4): 595–613.   2014. Morality and Economic Growth in Rural West Africa: Indigenous Accumulation in Hausaland. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 2000. ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’, Public Culture 12(2): 291–343. D’Ancona, Matthew. 2017. Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back. New York: Random House. De Genova, Nicholas. 2015. ‘In the Land of the Setting Sun’, Movements. Journal Für Kritische Migrations- Und Grenzregimeforschung 1(2): 1–12. Feltran, Gabriel de Santis. 2008. ‘The Management of Violence on the São Paulo Periphery’, Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 7(2): 109–34. Galemba, Rebecca. 2012. ‘Taking Contraband Seriously: Practicing “Legitimate Work” at the Mexico-Guatemala Border’, Anthropology of Work Review 33(1): 3–14. Gledhill, John. 2015. The New War on the Poor: The Production of Insecurity in Latin America. London: Zed Books. Gomes Vaz, Paulo and Maria Gabriela Hita. 2018. ‘Circuito de mercadorias e identidades africanas em movimento: reprodução social das mulheres angolanas e guineenses no comercio retalhista África- Brasil- China e Sudeste Asiático’, Cadernos de África Contemporânea 1(2): 108–33. Gossen, Gary H. 1999. Telling Maya Tales: Tzotzil Identities in Modern Mexico. London and New York: Routledge. Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House. Hale, Charles R. 2006. ‘Activist Research v Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of Politically Engaged Anthropology’, Cultural Anthropology 21(1): 96–120. Hart, Keith. 2004. ‘What Anthropologists Really Do’, The Memory Bank. Retrieved 18 February 2022 from http://thememorybank.co.uk/papers/ what-anthropologists-really-do/. Huntington, Samuel. 1993. ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, Foreign Affairs 72(3): 22–49. Ingold, Tim. 2008. ‘Anthropology Is Not Ethnography’, Proceedings of the British Academy (Vol. 154). James, Deborah. 2014. Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Machado da Silva, Luiz Antonio and Márcia Pereira Leite. 2007. ‘Violência, crime e polícia: o que os favelados dizem quando falam desses temas?’ Sociedade e Estado 22(3): 545–91. Mathews, Gordon, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Carlos Alba (eds). 2012. Globalization From Below: The World’s Other Economy. London and New York: Routledge. Moore, Jason W. 2017. ‘The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 1–43. Nordstrom, Carolyn. 2007. Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Pérouse de Montclos, Marc-Antoine. 2012. ‘Boko Haram et le terrorisme islamiste au Nigeria: insurrection religieuse, contestation politique ou protestation sociale?’, Questions de Recherche / Research Questions (40): 1–33. Pilkington, Hilary. 2018. Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Prandi, Reginaldo. 2000. ‘African Gods in Contemporary Brazil: A Sociological Introduction to Candomblé Today’, International Sociology 15(4): 641–63. Reis, João José. 1993. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Translated by Arthur Brakel. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. 2018. ‘Giro global a la derecha y la relevancia de la antropología’ Encartes Antropológicos 1(1): 5–26. Rodima-Taylor, Daivi and Bill Maurer. 2019. ‘The Missing Piece of the Fintech Puzzle: How Local, Informal Networks Play a Crucial Role in Remittances’, Next Billion. Retrieved 18 February 2022 from https://nextbillion.net/ fintech-local-networks-remittances/. Scholte, Bob. 1978. ‘Critical Anthropology Since Its Reinvention: On the Convergence Between the Concept of Paradigm, the Rationality Debate and Critical Anthropology’, Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 3(1–2): 4–17. Segalla, Vicinius. 2018. ‘Olavo de Carvalho criou filhos fora da escola e em comunidade islâmica’, Carta Capital, December 4, 2018. Retrieved 18 February 2022 from https://www.cartacapital.com.br/politica/ olavo-de-carvalho-criou-filhos-fora-da-escola-e-em-comunidade-islamica/. Streeck, Wolfgang. 2016. How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London and New York: Verso. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vallentin Hjorth Boisen, Susann. 2018. ‘Evaluación y reducción de riesgo en el trabajo de campo’, Alteridades 28(56): 73–84. Vidino, Lorenzo, Francesco Marone and Eva Entenmann. 2017. Fear Thy Neighbour: Radicalization and Jihadist Attacks in the West. Milan: ISPI/Ledizioni. Watermeyer, Richard. 2019. Competitive Accountability in Academic Life: The Struggle for Social Impact and Public Legitimacy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Wolf, Eric R. 1990. ‘Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power—Old Insights, New Questions’, American Anthropologist 92(3): 586–96.

Chapter 2

Between Conspiracy and Catastrophe The Political Unconscious in Malta Paul Sant Cassia

Introduction

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ince Max Gluckman, anthropologists have long been interested in events (e.g. Sahlins 1985; Kapferer 2015). In this contribution I explore the role of the political unconscious in apprehending traumatic events, or crises. In contrast to Badiou’s (2006) emphasis on the initial undecidability of events, I argue that reactions to traumatic events in smallscale, highly polarized societies such as Malta provoke persuasions and performances (Fernandez 1986) activated by the political unconscious. I borrow the term ‘political unconscious’ from Jameson (1983) but employ it differently to mean that the interpretative predispositions brought to bear in making sense of a crisis-event are the effects of past historical experiences, habits, traumas and expectations. In classical Greek, the word ‘crisis’ (κρίσις) is polysemic. It could mean a ‘decision, judgement, the turning point of a disease’ and a ‘distinguishing or discernment’, which is how Aristotle employs it (Liddell and Scott 1940: 997). In modern Greek, the cognate diakrino can also mean ‘to discriminate/separate’. We can thus draw a linkage between ‘unprecedented events’ and a ‘crisis/ κρίσις’: the former provoke interpretations or judgements (including blame) on the ‘moral significance of situations’ (Evans-Pritchard 1969: 53). Traumatic events open cracks in political surfaces enabling us to appreciate how the underlying political unconscious orients interpretations, including judgements about blame and responsibility.

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In Malta, traumatic events often evoke conspiracy theories as cosmologies of blame and exonerations of agency. Whilst conspiracies have received anthropological attention (Marcus and Powell 2003; Sanders and West 2003) catastrophes have not, at least not together with the former. But if a catastrophe can be the precipitating factor for a conspiracy theory we need to explore what social apprehensions they encapsulate, elide or project, and how they may have been shaped by historical experiences. Although all catastrophes trigger a search for causes, and hence for blame, this fundamental linkage with conspiracy may be crucial in small countries like Malta and Cyprus. Normally the greater the credence enjoyed by conspiracy theories, the greater the rejection of chance and theoretically, a fortiori, of fiascos. But in small societies acutely aware of their relative powerlessness, the cunning of unreason may well interpret the catastrophe as the intentioned conspiracy rather than the unintentional result of an ill-conceived plan. Such was the popular Greek-Cypriot interpretation of the 1974 Turkish invasion following the mainland Greek coup. Here blame was elided inwards whilst being projected outwards. The Turkish invasion and occupation of Cyprus became the intentioned conspiracy of the coup rather than its cocked-up consequence. Conspiracy beliefs and cock-ups are thus worthy of joint consideration because acceptance of the former and dismissal of the latter is how a political doxa entrenches itself. We can track the political unconscious between the evoked (as determining) and the rejected (as explanations) of such events. Whilst the evoked can include conspiracy theories, the rejected can range from pure chance to misjudged actions leading to unpredicted results, to pre-emptive, contingent actions that generated the catastrophe in the first place (such as the 1974 anti-Makarios Cyprus coup). The desire to ‘tie the knot’ between the conspiracy and the catastrophe can thus exclude more straightforward (or a whole range of contributing) causes, much like Azande witchcraft. Such elisions are the result of the workings of the political unconscious, pushing interpretation towards a set of socially imputed motivations by the agents held responsible for the original traumatic event. In this contribution I explore the assassination in October 2017 of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia (henceforth, Daphne) by a massive car bomb. Her website, a mixture of sharp investigation of political corruption and biting tabloid disclosures on the private lives of public figures, had been acutely divisive – and she had been relentlessly harassed by ruling Labour Party figures (including an MEP) as a ‘witch’ whilst cherished as a fearless, prescient sibyl by the indignant. The assassination’s explosive excess led many (e.g. Mercieca 2017) to draw similarities to Judge Giovanni Falcone’s Mafia killing in Palermo in 1992 as an intentioned conspiracy to stifle exposure. This hypothesis

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appeared confirmed once three alleged hitmen had been arrested and pre-emptive snitching was disclosed by a middleman taxi driver, who claimed as the mastermind a prominent business tycoon: a major partner in, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of, a new €450 million Liquid Natural Gas Power Plant Consortium (‘Electrogas’) involving a complicated supply structure from Azerbaijan. Through sleuthing the Panama Papers Daphne had alleged (subsequently confirmed after her assassination) that the Minister for Energy and the PM’s Chief of Staff had opened secret Panama accounts to receive kickbacks from an anonymous UAE bank account whose ownership she was trying to ascertain. Allegedly, the tycoon’s fear that Daphne would trace this account to him prompted the pre-emptive assassination. At the time of writing he is in preventative custody undergoing a pre-trial hearing. The assassination’s Mafia attribution was ambiguous. Was it the work of a local mafia or was Malta a ‘Mafia State’ where organized crime held sway (Naím 2012), as many claimed? The two are analytically distinct but merged in the local and international press, demonstrations, posters and popular commentary. ‘Mafia State’, ‘Omertà’ (code of silence), ‘La Piovra’ (The Octopus) and collusi (colluders, conspirators) were evoked by civilsociety activists. Was the assassination the realization of a conspiracy by an organized mafia to silence and intimidate, or a ‘typical corruption scandal with the usual cast of characters’ (Sampson 2009: 170) that had gone tragically wrong? If the latter, was the ‘Mafia Hypothesis’ (i) a ‘mere’ example of the globalization of neoliberal moralities by civil-society activists (Appadurai’s ‘ideoscapes’ [1990]); or (ii) symptomatic of deeper cultural apprehensions – i.e. the expression of specific anxieties harboured within the political unconscious? And could Maltese responses to the assassination event provide insights into a culturally specific construction of historical events, such as that suggested by Sahlins (1985)? To anticipate, I suggest that the ‘Mafia hypothesis’ was a persuasive local misrepresentation through its ethnic self-Othering because it expressed a ‘paranoia within reason’: ‘a “reasonable” component of rational or commonsensical thought and experience in certain contexts’ (Marcus 1999: 2). More than a ‘mere metaphor’, it expressed deep anxieties about the distribution of patrimonial resources that I characterize as ‘sibling or fraternal rivalry anxieties’: the product of a tension between an historically embedded popular expectation of the Maltese State as paternal benefactor dispensing resources, and an imagined national community of common heirship in scarce national resources susceptible to political capture. The ‘Mafia’ discourse, however, did two things. First, it retroactively framed the assassination as having been ‘predictable’, hovering between the ‘unspoken’ and the ‘unspeakable’, turning the

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ineluctable victim into a predestined martyr. Second, it elided over the shadowy genealogy of the postcolonial state itself as a ‘protection racket’, which I argue merits scrutiny.

‘Mafia Paranoias’ as Expressions of ‘Fraternal Rivalry’ Anxieties? The ‘Mafia State’ conspiracy hypothesis gained currency in Malta because it expressed the belief that the State had been captured by a mafia prepared to resort to political murder to protect its interests. The adoption of Italian terms such as omertà, intrecci (plot), collusi and La Piovra suggested that Malta faced a Sicilian-type mafia crisis and challenge. But in what way is Malta’s openly advertised ‘Mafia’ similar to Sicily’s traditionally controverted one? Four main anthropological approaches to the Sicilian Mafia can be identified: (i) as providing critical trust and security in a ‘missing state’ context on a supply-and-demand basis [the economic ‘Gambetta thesis’ (1993; 2000)] – Falcone further suggested that ‘it is nothing but the expression of a need for order, for the control of a State … it is a society, an organization, that is, in its own way, juridical’ (quoted in Bandiera 2003: 218); (ii) as a critical component of certain nation states’ (Italy, Japan and the US) late drives towards capitalist development [the political economic ‘Schneider thesis’ (2016)]; (iii) as ‘Mafiacraft’, a ‘Phenomenon in Progress’ – the interactions between ‘the denied, the unspoken and the unspeakable’ on the one hand, and the efforts of the state’s legal organs to identify it as a distinct form of criminality on the other [the social-constructivist ‘Puccio-Den thesis’ (2001, 2012/13, 2020)]; and (iv) recent ‘grassroots culturalist’ critiques of statist/political science approaches exploring how consent and complicity are inextricably woven together (Ben-Yehoyada 2018; Pipyrou 2014; Rakopoulos 2017). Despite differences these approaches converge in three main areas: (i) a mafia’s origins: a conjoining of absentee landlord latifondism (‘rent capitalism’) with early international export-market penetration (wheat, citrus) encouraging the emergence of Blok’s mediating ‘violent peasant entrepreneurs’ (1974) that kept the peasantry cowed,

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and their subsequent migration to the urban economy, controlling markets, construction, zoning, drug distribution, etc; (ii) its character: a sui generis form of criminality consisting of loose associations of structured, territorially based, solidary groups of self-made men involved in illegal business activities (extortion, racketeering and protection, contraband, illegal commodities, etc); and (iii) its ruinous social consequences. Apart from construction and zoning, none of these features obtain in Malta: large estates were historically absent;1 the State is far from ‘missing’ either economically or politically (it is predominant); criminals never formed into solidary, territorially based groups (nor controlled territories or markets); and Malta’s ‘Mafia’ has emerged in a context of neoliberal economic development, not poverty and oppression. Nor is it expressive of Falcone’s ‘need for order’ in the absence of the State. If we are dealing with a ‘Mafia’, then the Maltese State itself must be its fons et origo. But, a first paradox: the critique was not directed at the Maltese State itself qua state but at its occupation by an elected political party. This paradox is an important symptom of an underlying, deeper anxiety: not so much a ‘Mafia State’ but rather what the Venice Commission Report on Malta (2018)2 hinted at – that Malta’s postcolonial state has evolved into a neo-patrimonial one, wielding substantial controlling power through its economic and regulatory centralizing dominance, its colonially inherited legal unassailability, its reserve army of trolls, and its politicians’ ready deployment of ruinous libel suits to stifle journalistic exposure. If Sicily had a distant, extractive state, the State’s power in Malta has been hegemonic, militarized and the recipient of externally derived resources under the Knights of St John (who ruled the island from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century) and the British – shaping its social development. A second paradox: ‘Mafia-crafting’. Whilst ‘Mafia’ has long been resented as an ethnic slur in Sicily, it was only after considerable difficulty in 1982 that it was legally distinguished from simple criminality or criminal associations. A mafioso is defined as an ‘individual who profits from the intimidatory power emerging from the capital of violence embedded in his associates, even if this violence is not systematically applied’ (Puccio-Den 2012/13: 23). In Malta the conundrum of differentiating between corruption and simple criminality from mafia-type associations has never arisen. The Venice Commission identified not a weak or ‘missing’ State but one whose powers have been consistently expanded. Rather than being resented as a collective ethnic slur as in Sicily, mafiacrafting in Malta is openly proclaimed by half the population and totally

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rejected by the other in what I describe below as an oscillating ‘fraternal rivalry anxiety’. In short, mafia-crafting in Malta seems descriptive rather than an analytical synthesis of specific patterns of corruption. The generally agreed, distinct socio-political features of the (Sicilian) Mafia include: (i) semi-corporate groups consisting of adult male ‘fraternal sodalities’ (Schneider 2018: S17) that outlive their members; (ii) strong bonds of solidarity often through fictive kinship, transcending ‘blood’ kinship or other loyalties (Schneider and Schneider 2003: 86); (iii) uncertain violent leadership devolution, often through ‘parricide’; (iv) ‘cultural building’ among themselves (Schneider 2016) and ‘showy contributions to their respective communities’ (Schneider 2016: 19), from which they derive passive complicity; (v) protection from state sectors (pezzi dello stato) and politicians because of their ability to deliver votes, and connections with accountants, lawyers, etc. to launder their proceeds through national and transnational networks; (vi) violence against those cooperating with state forces of order; and finally (vii) a monopolizing of certain economic sectors. Gambetta argues that the Sicilian Mafia is: successful not just at coping defensively with lack of trust – as in the case of weaker and non-violent forms of association such as clienteles and patronclient relations – but at turning distrust into a profitable business by a relentless, and if necessary violent, search for exclusivity. Its single most important activity is the enforcement of monopolies over the largest possible number of resources in any given territory. (Gambetta 2000: 164, emphasis added)

None of the above obtains in Malta. Nor are there strong bonds of solidarity, although ‘friendships’ with powerful individuals are assiduously cultivated through gifting, declarations of ‘love’ by courting clients, etc. Subordinates in Malta expect money payments and do not form part of any enduring consociation. We can contrast Daphne’s hired assassins, each reputedly paid €150,000 via an intermediary (and demanding further payments once arrested to keep silent), to a mafioso’s admission: ‘I don’t get paid for killing people. I kill them because they told me to do it. I am a soldier. I have to have some recognition [of my help] at some point, but it’s not a payment’ (in Ben-Yehoyada 2018: 370). Whilst the Sicilian mafioso is a key mediator in a triad between the entrepreneur and the politician – independently wielding human,

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material and symbolic resources – in Malta dyadic chains link politicians with government appointees and businessmen. This is not to exclude ‘mediators’ but the key actors are individuals, not the resource-pooling consociation. At the top politician/administrator–businessmen relations, sometimes school-originating friendships (‘like brothers’), are sustained through mutual visiting, joint holidaying and ostentatious gifting on suitable occasions.3 Disengagement is difficult and messy. Influence with politicians is rarely shared except for minor client favours (e.g. a temporary phantom government job for the Daphne-assassination middleman), nor is it expected as in Sicily – ‘an important enough constitutive element of a person’s wealth to merit challenge, strife, and killing’ (BenYehoyada 2018: 370). Rather, clients prospect for scarce (sometimes phantom) patrons (in turn, clients of others) such that their mutual complicity eventually blurs their differences. Whereas the Sicilian mafioso patron ‘“offers” to make his client “grow”’ (Ben-Yehoyada 2018: 370), in Malta prospective clients scramble to receive such rare ‘favours’. This does not preclude unilateral abandonment by the patron or attempted blackmail by the client (as transpired between the tycoon and his secretly taperecording middleman) – the latter action being ‘suicidal’ in Sicily.4 Despite cultural similarities between Sicily and Malta their structuring, patterning and ethos of illegality differ – products of their political economies. In Malta rather than illegal economic monopolies, the state dominates economic life – a function of scale, the electoral system and its distinctive colonial crafting. The result is electorally legitimate political monopolies enabling a plundering of state resources – and thus, of national patrimony – by key politicians, their appointees and crony businessmen. The Sicilian Mafia blends grassroots protection and extortion. The Maltese ‘Mafia’ does none of this: it feeds off the State, not directly off society or the private sector. It neither extorts from nor offers protection to anyone. It is the ‘banal’ efflorescence of a long-ingrained and practised opportunistic, segmental plundering of state resources by individuals benefitting from revolving political protection: mafiosi without a Mafia. If ‘the modern republic, from its inception, was designed to economise on trust’ (Dunn 2000: 269), we can adapt Gambetta’s thesis: corruption in Malta is animated by the nurturing of political distrust into the profitable business of monopolistic power that in turn sustains corruption – not the power of business but the business of power. The Maltese mafioso lacks the intimidatory reserve violence of associates, the reassurance of their silences and the politician’s dependence on his mustered votes. His sole security is his associates’ equal and reciprocal insecurity, and their venal rewards and anticipations. Hostage to contingency, adept at the tactic, he plays checkers rather than chess. As De Certeau noted, the tactic

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‘operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of opportunities and depends on them being without a base where it can stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids’ (1984: 37). The Italian Parliamentary Commission defined omertà as ‘the capacity to make oneself respected through one’s own means, without ever resorting to the authorities, knowingly accepting imprisonment rather than saying what one knows or accusing others’ (Senato della Repubblica Italiana 1976: 106, my translation, emphasis). Maltese discourse employs omertà narrowly to mean ‘silence’ through political cover-ups by the authorities rather than resistance to the State or fear of violent retribution. It signifies a mutual tolerance between politicians and their followers who anticipate further populist ‘generosity’. There is no equivalent to the ‘Sicilian’ ‘trust’ in specific omertosi others in providing (if necessary, violent) protection through associates, and long-term support. Thus defined, omertà was not much in evidence once state pressure was applied. The middleman taxi driver/loan shark – worried about pre-emptive snitching by one of the itchy, incarcerated hitmen – complained that he had to buy their silence as the tycoon (unable to leverage their bail release despite his high-level friendships) had dumped them, refusing to accede to their further money requests, bemoaning that had he intuited the public outrage he would not have commissioned the assassination – a case of blind hubris. The protagonists harboured their own illusions: the assassins in the abductive power of their impenetrable technology; the middleman that his flashy, ‘powder-partial’, galantom (generous) patron could fix everything; and the latter that his slated political co-beneficiaries would protect him because otherwise they too would be compromised. Among these individual opportunists in their temporary ‘action sets’ fear of incarceration quickly dissolved any ‘solidarity’, precipitating a scramble to pin blame onto others. Refused state-evidence immunity, the businessman blustered, ‘If I fall, everyone takes the fall’ – thus compromising his credibility as meretricious state witness or as revenge-motivated dissimulating defendant but providing grist for conspiracy mills. If, as the Italian Parliamentary Commission noted in another context, ‘the real man [sic] is, above all, his silence’ (1976: 107), these were hardly the actions of omertosi. The assassination thus appears more like Sampson’s ‘typical corruption scandal’ that went tragically wrong: a cock-up attempting to conceal an ill-thought-out conspiracy of corruption, already unravelling through Daphne’s publicizing of the Panama Papers. As Schneider noted, ‘whatever the level, corruption seems far too pervasive, and too widely blamed for a variety of ills, to be diagnostic of Mafia states, as distinct from states that have not fostered Mafias. Nor are morally outraged discourses

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attacking corruption or the formal if episodic censure of certain practices as corrupt, absent from states with thriving Mafias’ (2016: 23–24). If, as Falcone warned, ‘everything is mafia, then nothing is mafia’, and if anti-corruptionists were seeing ‘Mafia’ everywhere, then that ‘nothing’ was a fabulation of something profoundly anthropological: a symptom of anxiety over the misuse of power, raised to a new level. It appeared validated by Daphne’s subsequently much-quoted final post – ‘There are crooks everywhere you look. The situation is desperate’ – which became her unwitting valediction, the ‘writing on the wall’ reproduced emblematically in graffiti, posters, etc. The immediate aftermath became so grotesque that some pro-Labour Party press comments requested that the bodily remains be DNA tested to establish whether the assassination had been stage-faked to damage the government. We can approach such anxieties as symptoms of ‘fraternal rivalry’ for there is a sense in which distinct (and ultimately disjointed) moral suasions of symbolic kinship pervade both the State’s relations with its subjects and the nation’s fabulation of an imagined community. Nurtured as a military outpost under the Knights of St John (1530–1798) and the British (1801–1964), Malta is an exemplar of Tilly’s thesis of the interdependence between war-making and state-making as analogous to organized crime: ‘to the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary, or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket’ (1985: 171, emphasis added). Blending ‘protection’ and ‘philanthropy’, the colonial state provided scarce employment and resources. Post-colonial representations of the State as ‘the Government’ (Il-Gvern) conjoin an ultimately opposed historical expectation (of ‘benevolence’ and ‘protection’) with competition anxieties. Mitchell’s (2002b) perceptive tracing of how the Maltese view il-Gvern identifies four interlocked levels, sometimes in tension: (i) as inscrutable arbitrary Uber-Agency, a colonial heritage; (ii) as composed of unaccountable, self-serving politicians; (iii) as the political domination of the state by a clientelism-dispensing party (klientelizmu); and (iv) as profoundly anti-poplu, displaying its power by being ‘strong with the weak, and weak with the strong’, in a way that can only be mitigated through clientelist dependency. Thus, through the projection of remote patriarchal authority and the expectation of benevolent paternalism materialized through clientelism, the state is imbued with the moral suasions of a hierarchically donative symbolic kinship.

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The Maltese fashioned their small nation, initially negotiated in the early nineteenth century for ‘protection’ that Britain readily granted, within an inherited, highly bureaucratized, overmanned, patrimonial state – not in opposition to it (as with Greece and Cyprus).5 The national community is imagined as egalitarian, calibrated according to a calculus of impossible equity in collective domestic sovereignty (darna/our home). As co-nationals Maltese view themselves as the autochthonous heirs (qua il-poplu/the people) – within a small, increasingly overpopulated city-state – to a national patrimony considered naturally limited, chronically vulnerable to unfair division or despoliation by state capture in a zero-sum game. This is neither Renan’s paradoxical ‘French’ ‘reassurance of fratricide’ (Anderson 1983) nor the Greek-Cypriot promise of lost traditional ‘fraternal harmony’ recalled as a lament against instrumentalized (often other) nationalisms (‘we got on well with the Turkish Cypriots, like brothers’) but rather the discomfiting, enduring prospect of fraternal or heirship rivalry over access to state resources. I choose ‘fraternal rivalry’ over mere bipartisanship because of two distinct characteristics: the easy, cherished mutuality of shared ethnicity (‘amity’) that can overcome divisions; and a competitive, political group mimeticism (Boissevain 1965) expressed through Bateson’s ‘symmetrical differentiation’ (1972: 77). It is grounded in seven features: smallness as interiorized constraint on realizable possibilities, egalitarian expectations, social interconnectedness, competition for finite national resources considered scarce patrimony, ratcheted mimetic rivalry, widespread political-party adherence and a pervasive expectation of politics as vitiated by ‘clientship’. As everyone is potentially knowable, connectable and marriageable, the ‘undeserving’ beneficiaries of benefits are not an abstract group but identifiable persons with whom one had not thrown in one’s lot. Class and status perceptions find partial expression through an ideologically undifferentiated two-party system. Sustained through family traditions and clientship, parties instrumentalize distrust and status perceptions, pretensions, and resentments – manifested by the victorious Labour Party’s 2013 labile electoral slogan ‘Malta is ours too’, or ‘Malta belongs to us all’.6 Corruption anxieties surface because social mobility is dependent on access to state resources (jobs, contracts) and economic success on strategically dispensed concessions. If ‘an intimate connection exists between how we understand corruption and how we understand politics’ (Philp 1997: 438), and if politics is animated by a bipartisanship that stokes apprehensions over state qua patrimonial resource capture, it follows that politics has become synonymous with ‘corruption qua unwarranted abrogation’ – as apprehension, explanation, justified accusation and fabricated imputation. Corruption is thus not

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a ‘mere illegality’, but a moral evaluation of individuals as members of political groups, whose “greed” for personal enrichment through the inequitable exploitation of collective public resources generates social resentment. Politics also functions as a status differentiator through moral essences. Whilst the educated middle class’s long despair of the ‘masses’ dominated by ‘the animal instincts of self-preservation and materialistic well-being’7 is echoed in contemporary critiques (including by Daphne) of easy state ‘bribery’ of an ‘uneducated’ populace, the latter blithely dismiss ‘classist’ attributions. Such predispositions provide fertile ground for a particular cultural structuring of political rationality: ‘heirship paranoia’ as ‘reason’s reasoning’, for this anxiety and inevitable resentments are widely shared. Corruption anxieties are thus not new to Malta. Long endemic, constituting its locally articulated ‘normal abnormality’,8 their incubation predates the neoliberal state that has merely increased the stakes. Two reasons can thus be advanced as to why the ‘Mafia hypothesis’ gained traction. The first is due to what Hibou identified as neoliberalism’s ‘apparent paradox’: the current ‘unprecedented moralization of economic and political life’ together with ‘the “persistence” of illegality at the very heart of states … that pose a danger to society as a whole’ (2012: 644, emphasis added), which she suggests constitutes its very mode of neoliberal legitimation through the constant projection of internal dangers – a type of ‘Pasteurization’ of the body politic. Except that here the Maltese state authorities nurtured and denied those very dangers. The second reason was the apparent semiotic transparency of the assassination itself.

The Opacity of Transparent Mises-en-Scène For an assassination to be understood as an assassination, Grayson has suggested ‘it must mimic the configurations, historical positionings and normative interventions encapsulated in assassination narratives. Thus, assassination events are emplotted and articulated within culturally situated meanings that go beyond the technical rationalizations that may foster them’ (2012: 26). Let us briefly note two facts that render the ‘Mafia projection’ via Daphne’s assassination further puzzling from a formal perspective. The first is that Malta has no history of assassinations and hence no prior models to draw from. The island’s so-called ‘assassinations’ were in essence cock-ups, politically instrumentalized as victimhood narratives. The second puzzle is that there have been some seven unsolved criminal shootings and car bombs since 2010, linked by Daphne to oil smuggling,

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drug trafficking and usury. These murders never occasioned the public spectre of a mafia qua criminality, as might have been the case in Sicily and elsewhere. The public appeared indifferent to the typical evidence of mafia-type (criminal) activity, whilst highly attuned to discern (or reject) it politically in the case of Daphne’s assassination. We are in the presence of an elision (the indifference to evidence of criminality, which middleclass activists neither encounter nor recognize for its political economic significances), substituted by a projection: an assassination as quintessential ‘mafia killing’, and consequently ‘mafia corruption’ behind it. The precipitating factors for the ‘Mafia hypothesis’ were the concatenation of Daphne’s disclosures and the semiotic significance of the excessive amount of explosives employed, drawing parallels with Falcone’s murder. Political violence, Feldman suggests, is a ‘genre of “emplotted action” … [an action of narration that organizes] events into a configurational system, a mode of historical explanation, and a normative intervention’ (1991: 14). Significantly, all these three components are traceable not from local culture but from an underlying media-packaged popular culture. And the chronotope was drawn not from contemporary Sicily but from the pre-1996 Mafia war on the State. In Malta, cinematic representations of mafiosi are popular. In a flamboyant, unwitting parallelism to local, activist mafia-crafting (e.g. La Piovra, ‘The Octopus’ or ‘tentacles’, initially deployed locally in Italian and now recently employed in Maltese: il-Qarnita) some Valletta restaurants disport marketing lures that would be repugnant in Italy, enticing customers through the staged ‘frisson’ of the ‘Omertà Trattoria’, ‘Cosa Nostra Wine Bar’, ‘Beati Paoli Restaurant’, etc. Sharp, dark clothes and shades, Bentleys and Lamborghinis, and cosmetically enhanced ‘footballers’ wives’ frolicking on yachts accessorize a new class of politically well-connected (and dual party-donating) businessmen – owning hotels, ‘Gentlemen’s Clubs’, pub chains, casinos, etc. Cinematic artifices have become prosthetics of identity for this new upwardly mobile class.9 The alleged hitmen, recognizing the victim’s high public profile, procured a high-velocity telescopic rifle that framed her as a ‘political’ target. Let us note here a particularly unpleasant fact: the victims’ identity often shapes their semiotically resonant assassination mode – Russian spies/ opposition leaders are radiation- or nerve-agent-poisoned, ISIS terrorists killed by US drones, Italian public prosecutors car-bombed, Slovak investigative journalists shot at close-range, etc. The high-velocity telescopic rifle inversely complemented the assassins’ unseen paymaster’s hidden identity, taxonomized their victim and would have ratified them as ‘professional’, ‘clean’ hitmen. This extravagant mise-en-scène was abandoned for the more familiar car bomb, sourced from externally connected local

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criminals. The surplus value of explosives unambiguously politicized the victim as a ‘cyberterrorist’,10 planted a mnemonic linkage to Falcone,11 conjured a plagiarized authorship through debris and generated widespread revulsion. This mimetic simulation led many to accept its semiotic transparency, whereas what actually demanded scrutiny was the simulation of transparency – i.e. why was it so ‘obviously’ like a Mafia killing? By ‘simulation’ intentional deception is not necessarily meant but rather a drawing upon models of, or precedents for, a way of doings things even if unconsciously vectored by Appadurai’s ‘mediascapes’ (1990). We therefore need to explore why the assassination’s transparency was so ‘evident’ that it was not interrogated as a simulacrum. Deleuze suggests that ‘the simulacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive power which denies the original … [‘Mafia’-PSC] … and the copy … [the popular perception of Daphne’s assassination as a ‘Maltese Mafia copy’-PSC] … the model and the reproduction’ (1990: 262, original emphasis). He suggests ‘simulation designates the power of producing an effect. But this is not intended only in a causal sense … It is intended rather in the sense of a “sign” issued from a process of signalization; it is in the sense of a costume, or rather a mask, expressing a process of disguising, where, behind each mask, there is yet another’ (1990: 263). When the plot was unravelling through arrests several stories circulated that conjured up such masks behind masks. First was a botched, febrile plot by the PM’s then Chief of Staff and the apprehended businessman to frame a minister whose libidinous forays abroad on government business had been exposed by Daphne. When this was exposed the businessman then claimed the PM’s Chief of Staff was the mastermind. A Mafia simulacrum created immense possibilities for conspiracy fabulations, including that the assassination had been concocted by a trinity (the silver-spooned tycoon, the philandering ex-minister and the shady Chief of Staff), with their corresponding anathemata (greed, lust and pride) – and thus an extravagant morality play, conjuring necessity out of contingency. From our perspective these fabulations’ truth or falsity is less significant than the fact that when an event is evacuated of any signification except its irreducible wretchedness, other ‘masks’ or rumours are deployed – including projections by the public that require a culturally recognisable narrative to realize their hidden expectations – which, moreover, the protagonists actively intricate by spinning further conspiracies to get themselves off the hook, further capitalizing on the social paranoia they had initially denied. Far from being the work of ‘the Mafia’ or a crypto-libertine cover-up, the assassination appears the work of precipitative misjudged opportunism: the regressive substitution of one mask by another, particularly when what appeared a conspiracy attempts to prevent its denouement as a

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fiasco by the fabulation of other conspiracies. As Taussig wryly observed ‘the secret is overdeterminedly southern’ (1999: 8; added emphasis). Three reasons can be advanced as to why the mafia trope had emotional traction. First, increased prosperity is seen as socially corrosive: ‘today, money is everything’ (il flus kollox), heralding ‘greed’ and the recurrent motif of a ‘collapse of morals’ (Mitchell 2002a) conjoined with spectacular, unexplained wealth. Second, Malta’s economy has increasingly been exposed to, and grown dependent upon, the transiting of transnational capital. Yet disquiet at the consequent potential for veritable mafia-type transnational money laundering (through lightly regulated new banks) or the scaling-up of the illegal circulation of oil, narcotics and weapons between Libya and Sicily via Maltese schooners (organized by the Sicilian Mafia Santapaola-Erculano family) are footnotes to localist concerns, unless linkable to national politicians. The dominant popular concern is that the State’s boosted revenues through its sovereignty capitalization enhances local corruption through opaque, complex deals – particularly those involving public–private partnerships with external service providers, such as in the fields of energy and health. Third, Malta’s ruling ‘socialist’ political group risks being considered allied with glossy foreigners whose scamming skills may be more finely honed than those of their homely local counterparts. The result is that a long history of nationally disadvantageous deals (over hospitals, oil procurement, gas supply, health services, etc.) are interpreted as blatant local political corruption rather than perhaps more disturbing neoliberal public-utilities asset-stripping. The external players include Azerbaijani oligarchs, shady ‘boutique bank’ owners sporting purchased St Kitts & Nevis passports, slick passport concessionaires operating from Switzerland and mysterious health-service providers hiding in layered companies. Such intimacies stoke grassroots unease as to whether the governing cabal is allied with ‘foreigners’ (barranin) to plunder the Maltese city-state. ‘Mafia State’ accusations thus function as subliminal signifiers of an oxymoronic ‘indigenous foreignness’. This may well play on anticolonial residues by casting these politicians as crypto neocolonialists, in alliance with suspect barranin to plunder the national patrimony. But ‘national betrayal’ is also construed as the outwardly directed subversion of the glossy ‘familial’ export-model façade essential for attracting foreign investment (like some courted, desirable groom). Government supporters and politicians have accused civil-society critics and opposition MEPs of being ‘traitors’ through inviting EU scrutiny (not just of Daphne’s assassination but also of passport sales), thereby compromising Malta’s unprecedented prosperity – another manifestation of ‘fraternal

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rivalry’ leveraging the ‘benefactor state’ to occlude its ‘protection racket’ underpinnings. Mafia-thesis adherents countered that the establishment of interlinked, secret, overseas bank accounts by key individuals immediately on coming into power evidenced a premeditated pillaging of national resources. True, but the attempted cover-up through the assassination was also a catastrophe that hastened the conspiracy’s unravelling and provoked a krisis – i.e. a ‘turn’ or judgement. Alliances with outsiders for personal gain evoke the long-established trope of ‘prostitution’, drawing parallels with the British period when the island sustained thriving bars, music halls and brothels. Just as ethnic honour was sullied through prostitution, national honour now runs the risk of being besmirched through the peddling of national resources to outsiders. Condemnation of these outcomes as ‘obscene’ (oxxen), establishes a close linkage with an outrageous exposure of intimacy. Mary Douglas had long noted the connection between danger and pollution, but here the tropes of ‘sullying national honour and reputation’, ‘shame’ (għajb), etc. are evoked by both sides of the political divide. Maltese politics is thus not an opposition between external, transcendent ‘European’ ideals of transparency and irremediable local cynicism to corruption, as civil-society activists suggest, but rather the employment of these features as embedded rhetorical strategies (see also Mitchell 2002b).

Tropes and Their Smuggled Costs The mafia trope was a new iteration of a long history of ‘Mediterraneanisms’, a blending of Appadurai’s (1990) financescapes and ideoscapes into essentializing southern European ‘ethno-crimescapes’, linking the locally indignant with wider, global civil movements including the Antimafia. This is neither to trivialize Malta’s corruption nor diminish the heinousness of Daphne’s assassination. It is rather to suggest that reactions to the specific, semiotic modalities of an unprecedented historical event were shaped in a determinate context that linked adopted ‘modes of historical explanation’ (‘Mafia killings’), ‘configurational systems’ (‘Mafia State’) and ‘normative interventions’ (omertà). Such representations, sustained by well-meaning visiting luminaries, worked their way into international media and the Venice Commission Report,12 perhaps to the detriment of its more substantial observations and recommendations (particularly that Malta’s political parties have cumulatively strengthened the state’s neo-patrimonialism).13 In ‘Mediterraneanizing’ local corruption to embarrass the incumbent

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political class, anti-corruptionists mustered a series of nested moral, hierarchical oppositions embedded in local homologies: lower undeserving class (ħamalli): upper educated class (puliti), :: local ‘mafiosi’: cosmopolitan Maltese, :: Sicilians/‘Mediterraneans’ : Northern Italians/‘Europeans’

In so doing anti-corruptionists risked ethno-essentializing their own society by adopting that same othering that is often applied to their Sicilian ‘cousins’, perhaps unintentionally inviting northern European latent moral contempt. For at higher levels of segmentary opposition local distinctions disappear to leave ‘Clean Europeans’/‘Shifty Mediterraneans’. Ironically, one motivation for Malta’s EU accession was to entrench democracy and reduce corruption. Instead, the island’s recent unprecedented economic growth, partly the result of its EU valueadded sovereignty capitalization as Europe’s ‘soft underbelly’ through passport sales, remote gaming, company-registration tax rebates, etc. – have cumulatively fed pari passu levels of corruption and Malta’s first assassination, enraging civil-society groups enough to evoke a scaled-up, internationally recognisable ethno-essentializing trope. In contrast to Greece, where traumatic events (such as economic crises) were paralleled to the Ottoman past in a rerun of history as myth (Stewart 2017), or to Cyprus, where the 1974 Turkish invasion was likened to the 1922 Asia Minor Megali Katastrophe heralding Greek-Cypriots’ worst nightmare (becoming re-‘Turkified’), Maltese history lacked relevant examples of local traumatic events within which to situate the assassination. If ‘traumatic events throw people into a direct relationship with reality, which reveals its radical strangeness’ (Stewart 2017: 137), here society became a ‘stranger’ to itself demanding its self-recovery. As one Maltese artist wrote, ‘I want my country back’. In a desperate ethno-cleansing reaction to an endogenously generated ethnic stain, civil society othered Malta into its uncanny ‘Sicilian’ doppelgänger. That such appeals were effective in applying international pressure on the Maltese government is a tribute to civil-society activism,14 conjoined with its persuasive effectiveness whereby the citizens of small states in the South are obliged to align their moral geography of villainy into recognisable patterns to the North as the latter’s secret source of symbolic capital (Taussig 1999: 78). Paradoxically, Malta’s anti-corruptionists face similar dilemmas to those of the Sicilian Antimafia without perhaps fully appreciating the complex challenges. The situation has been perceived by them in political rather than social terms. The overhaul of state institutions is an important beginning – and, like Italy, Malta may need a Second Republic. The

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Sicilian Antimafia recognized that the challenges were as much social and cultural as political, and that intrecci (intertwining intrigues) did not occur merely at the top (as assumed in Malta). In Malta these intrigues encompass passport sales; planning permits; and state land allocations for mega-tourist developments and the building industry, used for money laundering and a popular tax evasion multiplier. Ironically, Malta’s ‘mafia’ presents an inverted evolutionary trajectory to the Sicilian one. Whereas Sicilian mafiosi gobbled up aristocratic estates in the nineteenth century, their contemporary Maltese counterparts now eye the last under-capitalized resource: rural land. Church land, appropriated by the socialist government in the 1980s, is particularly vulnerable to well-connected depredation in anticipation of re-zoning. In Sicily, the Antimafia progressed from Mafia qua deadly phenomenon to corruption’s socio-cultural underpinnings. In Malta, reformers moved from corruption to ‘Mafia’, located in a particular political occupation of the State but bypassing its socio-cultural ecology. By employing terms such as ‘La Piovra’ they ontologized and exoticized it. Rather than approaching it as the product of a long-established culture of oscillating rewards and grievances – a mode of governance – Malta’s civil-society activists concentrated on a historically contingent peopling of a particular political ecology. Effect became cause. The Antimafia’s conundrum [‘Where does the world of mafiosi leave off and the world of “clean citizens” begin? What about the vast gray area between these moral poles?’ (Schneider and Schneider 2003:219)] has hardly been openly articulated. Substantial middle-class segments of society ethno-essentialize the answer along class and status lines: the ‘masses’ lack discretion, ‘they are only interested in [lining] their pockets’. The latter dismiss these explanations outright: the necessary compromises are practised by all in a naturalization of earthly venality because, in contrast to Sicily, most Maltese ‘mafiosi’ are drawn from the same middle class as anti-corruptionists rather than being ‘Toto’ Riinas from penurious backgrounds. The submerged iceberg of clientelism’s daily practices and the complex relationship between the globalized morality of corruption and the embedded morals of local culture are largely unscrutinized. This includes the issue of whether ‘corruption’ as a country index in the ‘global hierarchy of moral value’ (Herzfeld 2004) for the free movement of transnational capital condemns small societies to permanent ideological thralldom, and failure. Finally, Maltese anti-corruptionists face similar challenges to middleclass Antimafia activists who ‘find it very difficult to reach working-class audiences who it turns out have many reasons to be sceptical about

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reform’ (Schneider and Schneider 2003: 3) – partly because the latter question whether this is another route to carve out political and social careers through the ‘luxury’ of ‘spectacles’ of indignation. They have a leerier cognition of power’s inevitable covenants and accommodations than middle-class reformers in thrall to the ‘mobilisation of morality (according to the puritanical imaginaire of globalisation)’ (Hibou 2012: 654), arguing that the State everywhere has always been ‘strong with the weak and weak with the strong’, long before the recent, quasi-prurient, academic and journalistic unveilings of its neoliberalist seductions.

Conclusion In Islands of History, Marshall Sahlins argued that different cultures have different historicities: ‘different cultural orders have their own modes of historical action, consciousness, and determination – their own historical practice’ (1985: 34). He illustrates this by reference to the killing of Captain Cook, in which myth (the return of the god Lono) preceded the event (Cook’s first visit): ‘for the people of Hawaii Cook had been a myth before he was an event, since the myth was the frame by which his appearance was interpreted’ (1985: 73). His unexpected return, by contrast, was an event that fabulated a myth. The ‘God’ was not supposed to return out of season; as a potential usurper, Cook represented a threat to the chiefs and priests and had to be killed: ‘but no sooner dead [than] Cook was installed as a divine predecessor by Hawaiian ruling chiefs’ (1985: 74). We can cast the articulation between myth and event in Hawaii as one between ‘necessity’ and ‘chance’. ‘Necessity’ is the cultural framework in which contingent events (‘chance’) occur and through which they are interpreted. Sahlins notes, ‘an event is not simply a phenomenal happening, even though as a phenomenon it has reasons and forces of its own, apart from any given symbolic scheme. An event becomes such as it is interpreted. Only as it is appropriated in and through the cultural scheme does it acquire an historical significance’ (1985: xiv). If conspiracy beliefs are cultural schemes about hidden forces acting on society, we can see them as the modern version of myths in sharing three characteristics: they involve remote, inscrutable, ‘occult’ powers that cannot be resisted; they animate the social cosmos; and they provide explanatory schemes within which to situate extraordinary events: Captain Cook’s return and his ‘killing/sacrifice’ to become a god, or Daphne’s assassination to become a ‘martyr to truth’ – evidenced by the nightly erasure by government employees of her popular shrine for some two years after her death.

Between Conspiracy and Catastrophe

Figure 2.1. Temporary shrine to Daphne Caruana Galizia, opposite the Law Courts, Valletta, Malta. Photograph © Paul Sant Cassia.

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Daphne’s assassination also exhibited the ‘restlessness of events’: ‘a function of the ongoing interpretive and interactional competitions and contestations among principal actors and witnesses’ (Wagner-Pacifici 2010: 1374). This ‘restlessness’ was extended to the pre-event itself – supporting the idea that ‘hot’ cultures also construct history infused by their political unconscious. After Daphne’s assassination various luminaries claimed grimly that they ‘weren’t surprised’, indeed ‘almost expected’ it, in a reverse unveiling motion of Freud’s ‘uncanny’. Whilst these sombre ‘post-auguries’ went unquestioned – and indeed reinforced the uncanniness of ‘a death foretold’15 – the subsequent disclosure that a controversial playwright had proposed an (eventually unwritten) play, Who killed Daphne?, a year prior to her assassination was received as an appalling provocation. Its transgression lay in a prior posing of an unspeakable question that seemingly ‘invited’ the event that many luminaries subsequently claimed to have unspokenly ‘predicted’ or anticipated. Both fabulations, the unspoken and the unspeakable, suggest that Maltese society views certain historical events as partly predetermined by hidden, animating social forces that cannot be openly named for fear of realizing them – much like the unspoken apprehension that a candid acknowledgement of the ‘evil eye’ can realize its feared effects but are anticipated just the same.16 They illuminate the profound social discomfiture that results when a small-scale society’s ‘managed intimacy’ (Lowenthal 1972) is challenged by published disclosures. Ironically, in contrast to Hibou’s suggestion that economic crime in neoliberal states is reified as a ‘Witch’s Sabbath’ (2012: 653), in this case the neoliberal state’s trolls attacked the whistle-blower as a ‘witch’ for her disclosure of those very economic and political crimes. This leap from ‘knowing what not to know’ to ‘exposing what not to know’ (Taussig 1999: 2) – i.e. naming the unnamable – can be a dangerous revelation within a small island’s circuitry of power. As ‘pollutive transgression’ it provoked a dual process of containment (silencing through assassination) and consecration through that very destruction. Maltese society reacted by mythicizing its history (the event/assassination was ‘predictable’, even if unsayable) and historicizing its myths (the event/ assassination ‘proved’ its originally unspeakable predetermination). We could therefore invert Sahlins’ observation, ‘Daphne had been an event before she became a “myth” since her assassination was the frame by which her myth was constructed’. And it was uncannily ‘ratified’ by her final post, which appeared to render her assassination consequential to those very words – and thus simultaneously sacrifice, sacrilege and crime, whose intimate connection Hubert and Mauss (1964) had long identified as critical to the creation of religious value, corresponding here

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to Christian martyrdom as ‘witness to truth’ (displayed in “Daphne Was Right” posters).17 The event ‘conspired’ to make itself through a fusing of the unspoken, the unspeakable and the ‘prediction’ uttered by the victim. It is hardly surprising that civil society was seeing ‘Mafia’ everywhere, despite Falcone’s warning. The irony is that this was a mortal tragedy of venality: venality concealed, exposed and vengeful. And that tragedy contained a further one: there was no chorus urging reason and reflection. Such partially overlapping circles of conspiracy and catastrophe suggest that anthropological treatments of risk and blame (Douglas 1992) may require more nuanced considerations than hitherto. Malta’s survival-oriented political economy has long cultivated opportunism from national economic policy to grassroots advancement. The result is fuzzy boundaries between the legal/illegal and the moral/amoral (Pardo 2000), and a reluctance to audit risk, including to reputation – perhaps the only resource a small country may be able to capitalize on in the now wellexposed hypocrisy of the neoliberal world order. Politicians cultivate the inherited neo-patrimonial state system to shield the population from risk whilst pursuing risky national-development strategies in order to amass state revenues to ‘protect’ their subjects and reward supporters, in a circular loop. There is thus a very real sense in which the State in Malta can be seen as Tilly’s ‘protection racket’ in shielding its subjects from the ‘consequences of its own activities’. We could therefore modify Falcone’s warning: in seeing Mafia everywhere, anti-corruptionists missed the state’s shadowy lineage. Unsurprisingly, state acknowledgement and monitoring of risk (including its co-option of dubious practices) is thus not only compromised but is also evacuated, postponed and resisted until materialized through a catastrophe necessitating a public judgement (κρίσις). When egregious risk-taking results in a catastrophe, the answer to the question ‘whose fault?’ is already predetermined. Blame follows a specific pattern: ‘out-group’ essentializing and ‘in-group’ (initial) denial and (subsequently) responsibility abdication, including by cabinet ministers.18 Together, they militate against forensic analysis because the catastrophe is over-projected as a conspiracy of Manichean moral essences, detaching actors from their socio-political ecology. In Douglas’ (1992) Group-Grid intersecting axial schema, Malta occupies the ‘High Group Allegiance/Low Group Regulation’ Grid quadrant. ‘High Group Allegiance’ is expressed in corporate group bipartisanship (Tansey and O’Riordan 1999: 79) or ‘sibling/fraternal rivalry’; ‘Low Group Regulation’ in opportunism through individualism. Unable to restrain its transgressing members (as with the renegade businessman, ministers, heads of regulatory bodies, etc.) –

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indeed, protecting them because of complicity corruption and because redressive acknowledgement would be embarrassing – group regulation disappears, relying on ineffectual social censorship expressed through ‘a proliferation of images of transgression, and of the consequences of transgression’ (Mitchell 2001: 2). Blame is realized through ‘out-group’ moralizing on ‘in-group’ essences of the Other, which may be none other than a Girardian projection of the monstrous double.

Acknowledgements I thank Godfrey Baldacchino and Jon Mitchell for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts. Paul Sant Cassia is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Malta, where he established the Anthropology Department in 1992. He previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge (1985–91) and Durham (1994–2009). He has conducted research in Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Tunisia, France and Australia. He is the author of The Making of the Modern Greek Family (with C. Bada) (CUP 1991), Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus (Berghahn 2005) and edited (with T. Fabre) Les Défis et les peurs: entre Europe et Méditerranée (Actes Sud 2005; English edition, Palgrave Macmillan 2007).

Notes  1. Indeed, the state – as heir of the Knights of St John (1530–1798), British colonial defence appropriations (1815–1964) and Church property transfers in the 1980s – owns nearly 50% of the land.  2. The ‘Venice Commission’ (officially, the European Commission for Democracy through Law) is an advisory body of the Council of Europe. Its independent experts in constitutional law scrutinize constitutional arrangements in European countries and their practical implementation.  3. The apprehended businessman shared a WhatsApp group with the Prime Minister and his Chief of Staff and had presented the PM with a €20,000 Bulgari watch at Christmas and €5,000 bottles of Chateau Petrus at his birthday party. He also hosted the Police Deputy Commissioner at Italian premiere football finals and joint holidays at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, with the Gaming Commissioner, the Head of the Financial Services Authority and a senior official at the Office of the Prime Minister (all expenses paid), etc.  4. Not the ‘homely’ patronage of 1970s Mediterranean anthropology.  5. Baldacchino (2002: 202) has with some justification called Malta a ‘nationless state’.  6. The phrasing Malta taghna lkoll played on a slippery exclusion/inclusion, subsequently ironized against the governing party.

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 7. In the words of the Chief Justice in 1949.  8. Or what Mitchell (2002b) identified as Malta’s ‘Systemless System’.  9. As evidenced in the French M6 TV documentary Enquête exclusive – Malte, joyau de la Mediterranée et paradis de la corruption, 2 October 2019, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=n02_0YvmqKg (last accessed 5 May 2020). At time of editing (February 2022) the video was not available. It can be accessed (for a fee) on: https://www.m6videobank.com/ fr/asset-420309-malte-joyau-de-la-mediterrannee-et-paradis-de-tous-les-trafics-ldf. 10. So-labelled by a disgraced Maltese EU commissioner forced to resign by EU President José Manuel Barroso over corruption allegations. 11. See Puccio-Den (2001) on the Cosa Nostra’s adoption of previous terrorist modes of assassination (car bombs) for Falcone, thus further semioticizing its state attacks. 12. The particular footnote in the Venice Commission’s report comes on p. 86: n. 26. 13. Particularly Points 143 and 144, Venice Commission (2108) Opinion No. 940 / 2018. 14. Particularly notable is the political engagement of women in the Occupy Justice and Republika groups that replaced the main opposition party in disarray. 15. A term I unreflectively employed, following Gabriel García Márquez. 16. Particularly in the anti-Daphne social media, which believed it was ‘returning evil for evil’. 17. Daphne’s assassination site and her makeshift shrine under the Great Siege Monument representing Malta Invicta have become foci for flowers, vigils and pilgrimages – much like Falcone’s magnolia tree, in front of his former home in Palermo. 18. As evidenced in the testimonies before the Council of Europe-imposed ‘Daphne Enquiry’.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Theory Culture Society 7(2–3): 295–310. Badiou, Alain. 2006. Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham. New York: Continuum. Baldacchino, Godfrey. 2002. ‘A Nationless State? Malta, National Identity and the EU’, West European Politics 25(4): 191–206. Bandiera, Oriana 2003. ‘Land Reform, the Market for Protection and the Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: Theory and Evidence’, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 19: 218–44. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler. Ben-Yehoyada, Naor. 2018. ‘Where Do We Go When We Follow the Money? the Political-Economic Construction of Antimafia Investigators in Western Sicily’, History and Anthropology 29 (3): 359–75. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2018.1458720. Blok, Anton. Blok, A. 1974. The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860-1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs. London: Harper and Row. Boissevain, Jeremy. 1965. Saints and Fireworks: Religion and Politics in Rural Malta. London: Athlone Press. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. ed. C.V. Boundas, London: Athlone Press. Douglas, Mary. 1992. Risk and Blame. Essays in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge.

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Dunn, John. 2000. The Cunning of Unreason. London: Harper Collins. European Commission for Democracy Through Law (Venice Commission). 2018. Malta Opinion No. 940 / 2018: On Constitutional Arrangements and Separation of Powers and The Independence of The Judiciary and Law Enforcement. Council of Europe, Venice Commission, Strasbourg, 17 December 2018. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/default. aspx?pdffile=CDL-AD(2018)028-e. Evans-Pritchard, Edward. 1969. Essays in Social Anthropology. London: Faber and Faber. Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fernandez, James. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gambetta, Diego. 1993. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Protection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.   2000. ‘Mafia: The Price of Distrust’, in Gambetta, Diego (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 158–75. Grayson, Kyle. 2012. ‘The Ambivalence of Assassination: Biopolitics, Culture and Political Violence’, Security Dialogue 43(1): 25–41. Herzfeld, Michael. 2004. The Body Impolitic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hibou, Beatrice. 2012. ‘Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government: The Example of the Mediterranean’, Journal of Social History 45(3): 642–60. Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss. 1964. Sacrifice. Its Nature and Functions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1983. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Social Symbolic Act. London: Methuen. Kapferer, Bruce. 2015. ‘Introduction’, in L. Meinert and B. Kapferer (eds), In the Event – Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments. Oxford: Berghahn. Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. 1940. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lowenthal, David. 1972. West Indian Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcus, George E. (ed.). 1999. Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation. Chicago: University Press. Marcus, George E. and Michael G. Powell. 2003. ‘From Conspiracy Theories in the Incipient New World Order of the 1990s to Regimes of Transparency Now’, Anthropological Quarterly 76(2): 323–34. Mercieca, Simon. 2017. ‘Organised Crime’, The Malta Independent, 23 October. Mitchell, Jon P. 2001. ‘The Devil, Satanism and the Evil Eye in Contemporary Malta’, in P. Clough and J.P. Mitchell (eds), Powers of Good and Evil: Social Transformation and Popular Belief. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 77–102.   2002a. Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta. London: Routledge.   2002b. ‘Corruption and Clientelism in a “Systemless System”: The Europeanization of Maltese Political Culture’, South European Society and Politics 7(1): 43–62. DOI: 10.1080/714004968 Naím, Moises. 2012. ‘Mafia States: Organized Crime Takes Office’, Foreign Affairs 91(3): 100–11.

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Pardo, Italo. 2000. Introduction. In I. Pardo (ed), Morals of Legitimacy. Oxford: Berghahn. Philp, Mark. 1997. ‘Defining Political Corruption’, Political Studies XLV: 436–62. Pipyrou, Stavroula. 2014. ‘Altruism and Sacrifice: Mafia Free Gift Giving in South Italy’, Anthropological Forum 24(4): 412–26. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2014.948379. Puccio-Den, Deborah. 2001. ‘The Ethnologist and The Magistrate. Giovanni Falcone’s Investigation into the Sicilian Mafia’, Ethnologie française 31(1): 15–27.   2012/13. ‘Juger la Mafia. Catégorisation juridique et économies morales en Italie (1980-2010)’, Diogène (239–40): 16–36.   2020. Mafiacraft. An Ethnography of Deadly Silence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2017. ‘Facade Egalitarianism? Mafia and Cooperative in Sicily’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 40(1): 104–21. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12207 Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sampson, Steven. 2009. ‘Corruption and anti-corruption in Southeast Europe: Landscapes and Sites’, in L. de Sousa, B. Hindess and P. Larmour (eds), Governments, NGOs and Anti-Corruption. London: Routledge. Sanders, Todd and Harry G. West. (eds). 2003. Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schneider, Jane. 2016. ‘Mafia Emergence: What Kind of State?’, Italian American Review 6(1): 7–30.   2018. ‘Fifty Years of Mafia Corruption and Anti-mafia Reform’, Current Anthropology 59 (Supplement 18): S16–S27. Schneider, Jane and Peter Schneider. 2003. Reversible Destiny. Mafia, Antimafia and the struggle for Palermo. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Senato della Repubblica Italiana. 1976. I Dibattiti Parlamentari sul fenomeno della Mafia in Sicilia e l’Istituzione della Commissione d’Inchiesta. Relazione conclusiva, Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul fenomeno della mafia in Sicilia, Doc XXIII No 2. Rome. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from http://www.senato.it/service/ PDF/PDFServer/BGT/907857.pdf. Stewart, Charles 2017. ‘Uncanny History. Temporal Typology in the Post-Ottoman World’, Social Analysis 61(1): 129–42. Tansey, James and Tim O’Riordan. 1999. ‘Cultural Theory and Risk: a Review’, Health, Risk & Society 1(1): 71–90. Taussig, Michael. 1999. Defacement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1985. ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wagner‐Pacifici, Robin. 2010. ‘Theorizing the Restlessness of Events’, American Journal of Sociology 115(5): 1351–86.

Chapter 3

Crisis State of Mind

Spaces for Self-Determination in Permanently Troubled Times Daniel M. Knight

C

risis, usually defined as a temporary rupture in linear time, has become a permanent state of existence in Greece. What was once characterized as ‘troubled times’, a blip on the trajectory of late-neoliberal Europe destined to blow over shortly, has become an elongated condition of chronic socio-economic deprivation. Over ten years on from the ‘event’ of global financial meltdown that triggered calamitous regional economic failures, the timespace of crisis has been characterized by my Greek research participants as one of ‘captivity’ in a continuous present, where ‘apathy’ toward the future reigns supreme. People describe the uncanny atmosphere of ‘emptiness’ engulfing both their everyday practices and futural aspirations (Knight 2020), but at the same time a ‘comfort’ in knowing how to navigate crisis. Chronic crisis has become defined by orientations of stasis, maintenance and resignation as people describe feelings of ‘stuckedness’ and perpetual suspension between collapsed social orders and the emergent world not-yet-visible (cf. Dzenovska and Knight 2020; Knight 2021). An event, Slavoj Žižek (2014: 5–6) muses, is ‘the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme’. It is ‘shocking, out of joint’ and ‘interrupts the usual flow of things’ (Žižek 2014: 2). For Veena Das (1995: 1) certain ‘critical events’ annihilate and recreate the world, while Janet Roitman (2013: 20) identifies crises as basic units of history, in need of explanation. Crises exceed or defeat the expectations of structure, or routine – what is anticipated under normal circumstances (Knight and Stewart 2016). Events occur, Marshall Sahlins (1985: 153) tells us, when structure cannot replicate itself in the expected way. At

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the point of rupture, the pure ‘unthinkability’ of crisis produces the rhetoric opposite: ‘a proliferation of discourses about vulnerability and insecurity’ (Masco 2006: 3, also Roitman 2013). Ironically, at the time of the event, crisis is the only thing people can think about precisely because of its utter unthinkability. Yet, as David Henig (2020: 93) reminds us, critical events continue to shape temporal textures of everyday life long after the events have passed, producing expectations and anticipations of what constitutes normalcy as people come to terms with the traumatic schism of past–present–future continuity. New social truths become axiomatic, normalized (Pipyrou and Sorge 2021). In our case at hand, the popular – and popularized – rhetoric of the crisis-as-event meant that for many years after the onset of financial turmoil, pictures from Greece and the struggles of her citizens graced the front pages of newspapers and were beamed through television screens across the continent. Alas, those days are long past. Taking inspiration from Paul Clough’s (2014) work on conditions of long-term economic decline in West Africa, this chapter is concerned with what happens when a major social schism becomes normalized, when it remains part of the social fabric beyond the temporal boundaries of an event. How do people find pockets of liveability in the landscape of permanently and drastically transformed social environments? The 2009/10 crisis has lost its eventedness and the people of Greece are left to pick through the aftermath of a decade-long whirlwind that has reordered life and – to provocatively paraphrase Charles Stewart (2014) – ‘colonized the Greek mind’. I argue here that crisis has become a form of captivity wherein routinization has led to an uncomfortable comfort with the status quo. Disillusioned with concepts of futural emergence and having learned to negotiate the extreme changes brought upon all domains of social engagement, people in central Greece, where I have worked since 2003, have become accustomed to crisis to the extent that they find self-determination within the framework of chronic turmoil. I propose a concept of societal Stockholm Syndrome as a non-pathological way to approach the relationship between people caught in the clutches of externally administered crisis that has transcended the timespace of an event. The endemic nature of the redefined social order calls for new understandings of everyday activity that goes beyond the kind of headline-grabbing protest movements and radical action groups that marked the early days of economic crisis in the urban centres, to look at how people operate within the – often ethically unsatisfying – confines of chronic crisis. One way to approach the long-term impact of living in a chronic state of crisis, in which ‘crisis acquires an enduring hold on people’ (Vigh

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2008: 7), is through the lens of slow violence. Slow violence recognizes the repetitive, erosive nature of living in conditions of increased social suffering, in which dramatic change is no longer experienced as a jolting schism but has become normalized, perhaps even accepted as a necessary status quo. Some examples of slow violence include structural inequalities in race, gender and class politics; what Stavroula Pipyrou and Antonio Sorge (2021) term ‘axiomatic violence’. Slow violence unfolds within the ‘sluggish temporalities of suffering’, wherein the spectacle of an event fades into normalcy (Ahmann 2018: 144). It is the little things, Chloe Ahmann explains in the context of the long-term health consequences of a trash incinerator in south Baltimore, that eat away at the person in the new state of normalcy and obscure the view of what once might have been considered ordinary. At first glance the dramatic, highimpact consequences of crisis may not be visible, but the gradual brutalities of chronic crisis are often as destructive as the time of rupture itself (Davies 2019: 1). Drawing popular attention to the term, Rob Nixon (2011: 4) contends that: [v]iolence is customarily conceived as an event that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence … incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.

In Greece, the explosive, sensational event of 2009/10 continues to have repercussions on everyday life, like the residue shockwaves of the Big Bang still shaping the extremities of our universe 14 billion years on. But it is very rarely openly contested in the manner seen during the first few years after the event. Instead, crisis has been adopted as the marker of a generation: an epochal identifier rather than a rupture, in which people adapt to the ordinariness of the once extraordinary. This violent ordinariness has led to what Lauren Berlant (2011: 95) calls a general wearing out whereby ‘deterioration’ becomes ‘a defining condition of … historical existence’. Here I contribute to discussions on crisis as a chronic condition of historical existence by asking how people construct spaces for self-determination in permanently troubled times. Untangling reports of chronic crisis becoming a form of captivity, even experienced as societal Stockholm Syndrome, I argue that crisis in Greece is epochal, extending far beyond the spatio-temporal coordinates of the event itself, moving from episodic to endemic (cf. Vigh 2008: 7). The epoch structures and orients distinct possibilities for moral and political action, endorsing pathways toward self-determination in the quagmire of endemic turmoil. Resonating with one of the key teachings from Paul Clough’s

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(2014) work on volatile economic relations in West Africa, ethnographic theory of endemically troubled times provides unparalleled insights into the moral, affective and practical capacities of people to negotiate lives turned upside down.

Moral Problematics of Chronic Crisis I have explained elsewhere how in a Time of Crisis social needs and culturally embedded practices do not simply disappear due to the reduction of classic capitalist economic mechanisms of production and consumption. For instance, throughout the Greek crisis, status competition based on competitive consumption has continued, albeit on slightly altered terms – whereas once competition revolved around exotic holidays facilitated by bank loans, people instead take adventure holidays closer to home: abseiling, scuba-diving and skydiving (Knight 2015a). Further, much to the vexation of northern European creditors, coffee culture has not ceased; bars have remained packed in town centres with the need to be seen as important as the number of beverages being consumed (Knight 2015b). In austerity-ravaged south Italy, Stavroula Pipyrou (2014) has shown how the continued importance of maintaining a bella figura (beautiful appearance) by being adorned in designer clothes has been facilitated by a concurrent rise in second-hand clothes markets, secretly frequented by local residents. Similar to Clough’s findings on moral economies entwined with traditional capitalist systems, in southern Europe during the austerity years clientelist networks, status, expanding familial ties and social wealth have remained extremely important forms of ‘non-capitalist accumulation’ (Clough 2014: 326; also Clough 2007). In times of endemic crisis, when the rules of the game have changed for the long term, the indigenous ethics of personal responsibility endure despite overarching narratives of destitution and foreign attempts to encourage the radical transformation of social practice. Far from being a criticism of the ethics of local socio-economics at times of financial stress, these continued cultural practices represent self-determination in the face of externally enforced measures that have led to levels of poverty not seen since the Second World War. Alternative moral perspectives on commodification and consumption within local contexts once again underline the inadequacies of sweeping economic theories – be they Marxist or neoliberal – that Clough was always at pains to critique. In Greece, the moral questions of economic relations do not so much reside in whether or not clientelism is ethically problematic, nor in whether Greeks should or should not continue to participate in

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competitive consumption for social status while the world around them burns. The moral problematic that readers may discern from the present piece of scholarship – particularly given the abundance of anthropological work on anti-capitalist protest movements and local hardship-solidarity groups – is located in how my research participants now embrace a Time of Crisis, not opposing the enforced conditions but rather working with them to pursue their own, often opportunistic, goals. Local understandings of working within rather than resisting the exploitative power structures inherent in crisis (Troika [European Commission, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund] structural reform; German political meddling; international corporate investment; Chinese cornering of newly privatized sectors) may seem morally distasteful to some readers. Yet my informants report finding an ‘uncomfortable comfort’ in the new normal. In line with Clough (2014: 260), I believe that the study of a ‘collective mentality’ of local economic practice and the interpersonal relationships therein provides an ultimately morally messy but extremely satisfying real-world perspective on the everyday negotiation of economic depression. As the promises of futures past turn to violent rupture, then meander into the ugly reality of the chronic everyday, it is the anthropologist’s task to provide a close reading of how local people subvert, embrace and utilize the tools at their disposal. It is my intention here to further the analytical apparatus for studying endemic crisis as a social condition (cf. Vigh 2008). My argument on societal Stockholm Syndrome, or coming to accept captivity and subsequently navigate daily life within the parameters of chronic turmoil, may not be as unique as first suspected, for many examples of crafting spaces for life in chronic crisis come from Africa. In the context of endemic economic decline in Zaire, Janet MacGaffey (1987; 1998) demonstrates how in structural crisis the reduction of state administrative capacity provides scope for opportunistic social mobility. The booming secondary economy rises around entrepreneurial innovation at the crack where state regulation does not meet continued (culturally embedded) demand. ‘From such turmoil’, MacGaffey proposes, ‘people were finding creative and ingenuitive ways to deal with the situation and small initiatives were flourishing as people learnt to fend for themselves’ (1998: 37). Especially resourceful were the small enterprises, workshops and garages that had diversified and even started to compete with the remaining multinationals. These businesses were operating ‘within the cracks’ (Pardo 1996: 19) of the crisis-stricken society (MacGaffey 1998: 40). The stability of crisis – since crisis had been normalized the social milieu had become predictable – allowed for a permanent basis to be established for large-scale accumulation. Small pockets of the population

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had managed to find means for self-determination amidst endemic economic decline. I have explicitly noted elsewhere how a minority of people in Greece have found space for opportunistic diversification in the timespace of crisis (Knight 2015c). Employment diversification has seen travel agents change tack to cater for shifting demands in the tourism sector, while the rise in renewable-energy installations as a result of European Union and national-government green-economy initiatives has led to kitchen salesmen stocking solar panels. The need for cheap alternatives to fashionable cafeterias in the town centre has generated a surge in streetfood takeaway joints and ‘everything 1 euro’ souvlaki (skewered meat) shacks. Continued demand, albeit on slightly altered financial terms, is thus serviced and the accumulation of social capital, trade networking and patron–client relations is perpetuated much like both Clough and MacGaffey suggest. Further, a prominent secondary economy has proliferated around energy supply and demand. With petrol central heating becoming too expensive, no mains gas and the renewables industry operating as an extractive economy not serving local communities (Argenti and Knight 2015), since 2013 people have begun lighting open fires and wood-burning stoves to heat their homes (Knight 2017). Car mechanics and self-employed electricians have taken cash-in-hand jobs as photovoltaic-panel engineers, linking solar parks to the national grid in the summer months, while working to install wood-powered central-heating systems and thermostats in the winter. The ordinariness of the once extraordinary allows for predictability and the competent navigation of structural economic decline, and once-precarious employment has been stabilized. In order to better grasp the moral intricacies and practical dynamics of fashioning livelihoods out of crisis, anthropologists must answer Henrik Vigh’s call to approach crisis as context: ‘a terrain of action and meaning rather than an aberration’ (2008: 8). In his seminal paper ‘Crisis and Chronicity’, Vigh advocates a departure from perceiving crisis and trauma as momentary phenomena in favour of an understanding of critical states as pervasive contexts. In many parts of the world, he argues, crisis is not an ‘intermediary moment of chaos’ but an ordinary state where people are forced to ‘make lives in fragmented and volatile worlds rather than waiting for normalization and reconfiguration’ (Vigh 2008: 8). Crisis is thus a condition in which people must improvise with the elements of their social and political technologies and cope with a variety of unexpected disruptions and opportunities (Greenhouse 2002: 8). In such situations the individual and the social environment are in constant dialogue – crisis forces ‘agents to take into account not only how they are

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able to move within a social environment, but also how the social environment moves them, and other agents within it, as they seek to traverse envisioned trajectories’ (Vigh 2008: 18). This form of reflexive routinization helps people order disorder, to act and live in it, to gain a modicum of control. It is to this debate of the negotiation of socio-economic deterioration as historical existence that much of Clough’s work intrinsically contributed, and it is to this that I now turn.

A Theory of Stockholm Syndrome On 27 March 2017 the conservative newspaper Kathimerini ran an article on Greece’s Stockholm Syndrome. The piece, published in the Greek economics section, discussed how living with crisis had become ‘naturalized’, the ‘new normal’ and even at times ‘positive’ – highlighting increased e-commerce, plastic transactions and reduced tax evasion (Papadogiannis 2017). Stockholm Syndrome has appeared regularly in the Greek print media to frame the experiences of a nation held captive by foreign creditors and inept political figures. Although authors offer politically nuanced opinions on accountability, Stockholm Syndrome as a method to frame chronic crisis has adorned the pages of the national press and reflects grassroots narratives referencing the ‘captivity’ of crisis.1 Captivity, I suggest, is the resonant aesthetic that signifies the inescapability of the practical and affective rollercoaster that is chronic crisis.2 I argue for a scaling-up of individual captivity narratives to an overarching structure or atmosphere of societal captivity that exists in times of chronic crisis, employing fine-grained grassroots accounts to produce societal theory on the intersection of economy, agency and temporality (see Clough 2020). The routinization of captivity provides a degree of comfort, even identification with the new normal, as suggested in the numerous Greek media articles. It is the increasing familiarity with a state of captivity (and the relationship between captives and captors) that I frame as Stockholm Syndrome; ‘[a]n expressive modality, a vernacular theory, a way of seeing the world, an intimation of the way it all makes sense’ (Lepselter 2016: 4), Stockholm Syndrome may be utilized to better comprehend scalar relationships (individual–state, policy–global markets and more) fostered in times of chronic crisis. After more than a decade of structural austerity, seeing social relations through the prism of Stockholm Syndrome provides insight into how people locate themselves within the perceived permanence of crisis. On the ground, justifications for current living conditions are widespread and further illustrate how people have become accustomed to the

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current status quo, logicizing an epoch of significantly increased social suffering, sometimes vindicating the actions of the perpetrators. One research participant, Stella, a 34-year-old university-trained lawyer who currently works as a barwoman, says that crisis is now ‘the background’ of daily life: ‘people have established an intimate familiarity with living under the conditions imposed by the Troika, and more recently the longterm effects of deep-rooted structural reform’. For Stella, it has become ‘pointless to look beyond crisis, to look past the conditions we have here and now … I just want to get on with life and that means accepting that my destiny is controlled by others … it has been for over ten years’. For people like Stella, captivity has become ordinary; her personal fragility is encompassed by structural familiarity. But what are the roots of the concept of Stockholm Syndrome and how might a psychological analytic help us understand scalar relations between individuals and social environment? In 1973 convict Jan-Erik Olsson attempted to rob Kreditbanken, a bank in Stockholm, Sweden. During the robbery Olsson took four employees hostage for six days. When Olsson and his accomplice Clark Olofsson were captured and later taken to court, all four hostages refused to testify against them, instead launching a money-raising campaign for their defence. In analysing the condition of the former hostages, Swedish criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot identified a psychological condition that was later termed in the popular press ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ (Namnyak et. al. 2008: 5). As well as feeling affinity or understanding for the motives and methods of the captor as a survival strategy, other characteristics of Stockholm Syndrome include wanting to remain or later return to the place of captivity, maintaining a relationship with the captors, feeling extreme anxiety about life after captivity and expressing futility over the hostage situation. Stockholm Syndrome is existentially and morally paradoxical in that the sentiments captives feel towards their captors contradict the fear and distain an onlooker might experience. Stockholm Syndrome, it has been argued, can be both a personal psychological condition and a societal issue shared by a group living through the same transformative conditions (Graham 1994). The primary concern in both cases is simply survival. It is on these terms that I suggest that Stockholm Syndrome can be used as a ‘vernacular resource’ (Adorjan et. al. 2012) to represent individual and societal reactions to a chronic Time of Crisis. To follow Henrik Vigh (2008) in stating that to untangle the often unfathomable social behaviour present in a time of dramatic change crisis should be approached as a condition, in Greece chronic crisis has fostered an affective structure of Stockholm Syndrome marked by an intimate uncomfortable comfort with living in perpetual

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crisis, as expressed by Stella. The trope of Stockholm Syndrome provides insight into how people embrace the Time of Crisis as a permanent present with its own temporal rhythms and orientations, and craft a life among the rubble. Projecting post-crisis futures is both impossible and undesirable since crisis has become embedded in everyday life and is all that is known and all that can be imagined. To change the dialogue between individual and social environment would be to alter the familiar condition that has ultimately become navigable. ‘I no longer want the future, I can’t imagine it, I live in fear’, Aphrodite dramatically states as we walk the slope of an archaeological site outside of the town of Trikala in 2017. ‘In the beginning, the first years, I wanted to escape the crisis, all the unknowns, like taxes, precarious employment, all the suppressing media buzz about politicians and bailouts that was our life all day every day. But I, like so many others, have learned to cope, to live life in the permanent clutches of crisis’. A self-employed 38-yearold mother of two, Aphrodite’s views are representative of the majority of my research participants in Trikala who express a familiarity with crisis, saying that they have become accustomed to the epoch. ‘Wherever you look, whichever way you run, you run right back into crisis. It is a circle, it is chronic, never-ending’. A decade on from the onset of fiscal austerity, the latest episodes of the crisis saga continue to be played out around the clock on television and in daily newspapers. ‘The bills with unexpected and unexplained tax hikes, having to purchase second-hand clothes for my son, I am constantly reminded that crisis is here to stay; there is nothing “beyond”’. For Greek youth, a Time of Crisis is all they have known. The ‘crisis generation’ have been raised in a world where the vernacular is austerity, memoranda, Troika – the key affects being suppression; nausea; disenchantment; and, more recently, apathy and exhaustion toward the future. The existence of everyday life – the ability for material accumulation, the promises of futures past, previous expectations and anticipations of life in twenty-first century Europe – is fixed in what Lewis G. Gordon (2015: 138), writing on the permanence of catastrophe in the post-financialcrisis age, calls a ‘cultural disaster’ that ‘leads to a rallying of forces against the future. It demands sacrifice of the young’. In conversation with Aphrodite in 2014 she mentioned that she was no longer fighting the economic crisis that was infiltrating every aspect of her daily life but rather learning to live alongside and within crisis, accepting the permanence of the condition and negotiating the environment ‘at [her] feet’ (i.e. in which she lives). For Aphrodite, and many others, it was a choice between either accepting the status quo or, in her words, ‘going mad’. ‘Eventually, if you listen to all the commentators on the television,

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continue to discuss the crisis with friends, or pay too much attention to the bills on your kitchen table, you will fall sick, collapse, or contemplate suicide’ (for comparison, see Davis 2015). She says that the crisis is permanent, ‘singular’ and ‘the Greek people, have accepted that … We have adapted and learned to survive … diversified our lives, found pockets of existence’. She says that ‘it may not be pretty’ or even ‘understandable’ for people in northern Europe looking down on Greece, but ‘life must go on. We must play by the rules in front of us’. Poignantly, Aphrodite insists that she and her friends are now ‘comfortable’ with crisis, that they ‘know how to navigate’ the suffocating consequences of austerity enforced by their ‘occupiers’ who have ‘suppressed’ them for so long. She has found what Olga Shevchenko (2009: 9) working in a postsocialist context has termed ‘the competent navigation of a perpetual crisis’. Talk of a post-crisis future, Aphrodite adds, ‘only makes people more anxious to the point of physically vomiting with the fear of the unknown’. The intimacy felt with the crisis situation means that any discussion of emergence is met at best with apathy, often ridicule, sometimes remarkable fear as the future becomes an illusion that is difficult to sustain (Gutiérrez Garza 2018: 96). The Time of Crisis has become permanent and the affective structure is being discussed in terms of comfort and coping with current living conditions rather than a futural momentum based on hope or potentiality, or a bitter desire to break free from the condition of crisis as manifested in the form of infamous street protests that occurred in the first few years. Paralysis and stasis may mark the temporal rhythm and speed of the epoch, but not how people have chosen to navigate social relations while embracing the crisis environment. The Time of Crisis is experienced as an elongated temporal period that has become an inescapable and enduring way of life, so much so that emergence from the epoch of crisis induces intense anxiety as to what is over the futural horizon and on occasion entices people to defend their hardship – and lack of future – as justified and somehow desired. Permanence as a primary temporal orientation of crisis can be considered more devastating than apocalyptic scenarios of annihilation, since the latter leaves nothing for reflection (Gordon 2015: 126). This ethos is captured expertly by a precariously employed 40-year-old research participant, Kostas, who argues that it is better to intimately know your captor than to place trust in the vagaries of futures unknown: ‘I have chosen to put my trust in what is familiar to me. There is no end to this crisis and the politicians and bankers are all making promises, but nothing changes. I now know how to live in crisis. I trust myself in this condition … I have come to trust crisis, I know what to expect’. Kostas

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says that he can ‘defend’ his family of four from Greece’s occupiers, but to do this he has to ‘collaborate’ with the situation of crisis, not ‘focus [his] energies on resistance’. I ask Kostas to elaborate on why he desires to maintain the current status quo when politicians and bureaucrats talk about emergence and prosperous futures; ‘You don’t understand. I am sure that it seems strange, almost a paradox to the northern European. It is not necessary to resist, to fight for an alternative future. Whoever we place our trust in to deliver this future will be just as corrupt, just as controlling. I have to focus on my own life and for this I need security … I know how to navigate crisis, I have found comfort here, in this condition’. Referring to crisis as a ‘condition’ or ‘context’ in much the same way as propagated by Vigh, Kostas emphasizes how he cannot risk the uncertainty of a post-crisis world and would rather maintain the current status quo, which is now so familiar. He trusts his current captors – who he sees as ‘northern European neoliberals … Germans and big banks’ – more than Greek politicians who offer promises of emergence into something new. Working three jobs in the informal economy, Kostas puts food on the table, is never behind on rent payments and has expanded his social contacts into the energy sector. His accumulation of clientelist networks in the mayor’s office and local iterations of international corporations has been facilitated by the condition of chronic crisis: ‘I never would have spoken to the people in [political] power before the crisis, but now I get a phone call from the mayor’s office every couple of weeks, asking me to go and work on energy projects’. Kostas’s services are in high demand and family status – if not necessarily monetary wealth – has been boosted in the crisis years. What might be seemingly illogical to outsiders – the desire to maintain a Time of Crisis owing to the uncomfortable comfort of the crisis condition – is the Stockholm Syndrome effect of the epoch. Within the timespace of crisis people have managed to find a degree of self-determination and, after years of struggle and protest, find a sense of security and stability in the familiar social environment.

Beyond Greece We can observe similar relationships to the condition of chronic crisis throughout Europe and, as Dace Dzenovska (2018; 2020) has argued, an ethnographic focus on themes such as emptiness and maintenance can provide insightful critiques of how people invest (or not) in futures beyond crisis. For Dzenovska, during the economic crisis in Latvia, migration away from the deindustrialized, rapidly emptying countryside to work in rural England is an act of seeking futures past – namely,

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of stable employment and small-scale financial prosperity. Remaining in the emptying Latvian countryside is a political act in which people create the future as a little bit more of the present, a present of austerity and scarcity for ‘the sense of making life go on for a little bit longer’ (2018: 20; also Dzenovska 2020). Her informants cling to the epoch of crisis and find comfort in its familiarity. Migration is undesirable since navigating the consequences of crippling internationally imposed austerity measures is understood as both a political and pedagogical stance. In a comparable case, this time set in the context of a post-industrial German city, Felix Ringel offers a critique of the past–present–future relationship through the lens of maintenance. In some instances, he argues, people strive to maintain their current living conditions through endurance and sustainability in the face of unwanted, accelerated change (Ringel 2014; 2018). Working in post-socialist Moscow, sociologist Shevchenko wrote a thesis on the routinization of crisis or what she calls ‘the permanence of temporary conditions’ (2009: 62). Many aspects of life in Moscow after socialism were relatable to the Greek case. Expecting rapid change after the political rupture of the late 1980s, Shevchenko found that for the majority of Muscovites the post-crisis era brought a continuation of a Time of Crisis. Akin to how Greeks discuss their concerns that emergence will bring another, perhaps more punitive, politico-economic regime, Muscovites lamented that post-socialism offered no stability, no change, ‘life was unfolding in crisis all the time’ (Shevchenko 2009: 17). Over previous decades Muscovites had, Shevchenko suggests, become intimate with a framework of permanent crisis within which they had managed to develop an entire infrastructure of coping whose ‘permanence would match the permanence of crisis and prevent it from disrupting one’s life’ (2009: 63). Shevchenko claims that crisis had become the ‘new habitus’ since people reacted to its permanence by fashioning equally permanent ways of dealing with a life in perpetual crisis. In the same manner that people in Greece talk of having learned to cope with a Time of Crisis in an intimate relationship that provides a sense of security and familiarity, in Moscow the chronic nature of crisis had led to a normalization; a new rupture was undesirable. Within the total crisis framework, coping strategies had led to people finding their own spaces to determine life within the constraints imposed by outside forces. Akin to what Clough found in West Africa, there were possibilities for life within the remit of a Time of Crisis. This is also very similar to what my research participants report when they discuss having ‘learned to live’ in the timespace of crisis and no longer ‘fighting the regime’ but ‘finding a way to get on with life, whatever that might now look like’.

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As I have suggested above, the physical and psychological effects of Stockholm Syndrome are not confined to individuals in situations of captivity but can be scaled-up to a societal level to be descriptive of relationships between groups, objects, nations and deities on whom someone may be dependent (Lepselter 2019; Pilevsky 1989: xi). Characteristics that may be noticed in societal Stockholm Syndrome and are pertinent to the Greek context include fear of life post-captivity, temporal disorientation, guilt for one’s imprisonment, and dependence on and justification of the captor. In the need to prioritize survival amid drastically altered social conditions, it has been argued that people displace the ‘impulse to hate the person who has created the dilemma’ (Adorjan et. al. 2012). Coping methods are relatively quickly developed, including genuine feelings of commitment to the new conditions of life as the captee begins to convince themselves that the only way to survive is to establish an attachment to the captor. In the International Relations literature, Stockholm Syndrome as trope has been used to define the relationship between Western Europe and the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s, in which Western European governments were trusting their enemy (the Soviet Union) and questioning their long-term ally (the United States) (Pilevsky 1989). For Pilevsky, Western Europe became, in a profound way, a captive of the Soviet Union: a relationship based on fear and dependence whereby Western Europe began increasingly to identify with its captor at the expense of the United States. In the context of the latter Cold War years Stockholm Syndrome was employed as a vernacular resource that referenced societal relations during a transformative epoch, and it is in this manner that I believe Stockholm Syndrome provides a useful discursive framework to think through chronic crisis in Greece. The perspectives described by my research participants – paralysis, justification for their punishment, security in entrapment, fear of life outside the timespace of crisis – echo the indicators of people involved in an intimate relationship with their captors, in which survival is of foremost concern.

Conclusion Stockholm Syndrome is a useful tool in analysing the fashioning of everyday relations within the condition of chronic crisis. I am reflexively aware that within this chapter I employ at least three terms that could be considered as portraying crisis, and the relations within, as a pathological condition: ‘crisis state of mind’, ‘colonizing the mind’ (following Stewart) and ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Yet in employing the terms I do not intend

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to detract from the agency and creativity of my research participants (cf. Theodossopoulos 2014). Instead, I am addressing Vigh’s argument that we consider not only how people move within a social environment but also how the social environment moves them. Coping with crisis under the so-called Troika ‘occupation’ and its aftermath has led to many people creating a space of self-determination within the confines of austerity. Indeed, Clough talked of a ‘collective mentality’ that prevailed as alternative moral systems rose to the fore during economic depression; MacGaffey identified the entrepreneurial opportunism required to navigate chronic crisis; and Shevchenko suggested that permanent crisis becomes engrained on the body, leading to a set of social practices intimately tied to living in crisis with a degree of comfort. In short, chronic crisis does not necessarily equal total destruction since people are resourceful souls, aptly adapting as futural horizons of expectation collapse. With sovereignty removed, people have invested a great deal of emotion and energy in finding coping strategies that transcend the renegotiated living conditions of often extreme poverty and precarity. They have chiselled out a space within the Time of Crisis in which they can survive. In Greece, crisis has become the usual flow and the stable scheme that provides what Das (1995) calls a ‘reference point’ for everyday life. When the economic crisis hit in 2009/10, the event shattered ordinary life; it was a rupture, ‘a transformation of reality’ (Žižek 2014: 2). But having lost its eventedness, crisis has been turned into a symbolic resource with which people identify and orient their lives. Crisis talk now performs a permanent communicative function, allowing people rhetorical transitions between topics and a way to justify socially problematic scenarios associated with poverty, loss and futility (Shevchenko 2009: 74). The analytic of Stockholm Syndrome helps unpack the structure of a Time of Crisis marked by sense of permanence. Kostas describes how he trusts the structure of internationally enforced reforms that have guided his life for more than a decade more than he trusts his own Prime Minister’s promises to rescue him from the hands of foreign captors. Others state their acceptance of the status quo, living under the thumb of ‘occupiers’. One informant describes how crisis is his ‘safe place’ in the ‘here and now’, a paralysis he has ‘learned to live with’. The critical event losing its eventedness has led to a new axiomatic normalcy, resulting in stability both in the social environment and in people’s expectations for the future. Crisis has become epochal. The reflexive routinization of crisis has led to people being able to act and live in a state of disorder. Now that they have gained a modicum of control over life after the initial spectacular rupture, they do not engage in

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imaginations of emergence lest they lose control. ‘Post-crisis’ is an uncertain timespace that risks destabilizing an environment, a condition and context that people have fought hard to come to terms with. Deterioration has become part of historical existence, a familiar landscape where livelihoods are resourcefully fashioned in the uncomfortable comfort of a chronic condition. Daniel M. Knight is Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is the author of History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece (2015), Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (2021), coauthor of The Anthropology of the Future (2019) and coeditor of Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe (2016). Daniel also coedits the History and Anthropology journal.

Notes  1. News outlets carrying stories on Stockholm Syndrome span the political spectrum and include Kathimerini, Proto Thema, Times News, AlfaVita, and left.gr.  2. Parts of this section appeared as an Anthropological Theory Commons blogpost. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://www.at-commons.com/2020/10/16/ greeces-stockholm-syndrome-futility-in-a-time-of-crisis/.

References Adorjan, Michael, Tony Christensen, Benjamin Kelly and Dorothy Pawluch. 2012. ‘Stockholm Syndrome as Vernacular Resource’, The Sociological Quarterly 53: 454–74. Ahmann, Chloe. 2018. ‘It’s Exhausting to Create an Event out of Nothing: Slow Violence and the Manipulation of Time’, Cultural Anthropology 33(1): 142–71. Argenti, Nicolas and Daniel M. Knight. 2015. ‘Sun, Wind, and the Rebirth of Extractive Economies: Renewable Energy Investment and Metanarratives of Crisis in Greece’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(4): 781–802. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clough, Paul. 2007. ‘The Relevance of Kinship to Moral Reasoning in Culture and in the Philosophy of Ethics’, Social Analysis 51(1): 135–55.   2014. Morality and Economic Growth in Rural West Africa: Indigenous Accumulation in Hausaland. Oxford: Berghahn.   2020. ‘Agency, Time, and Morality: An Argument from Social and Economic Anthropology’, in Peter Rόna and László Zsolnai (eds), Agency and Casual Explanation in Economics. London: Springer, pp. 115–24.

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Das, Veena. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Thom. 2019. ‘Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: “Out of Sight” to Whom?’ Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. 1–19. Davis, Elizabeth. 2015. ‘“We’ve toiled without end”: Publicity, Crisis, and the Suicide “Epidemic” in Greece’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 57(4): 1007–36. Dzenovska, Dace. 2018. ‘Emptiness and its Futures: Staying and Leaving as Tactics of Life in Latvia’, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 80: 16–29.   2020. ‘Emptiness: Capitalism without People in the Latvian Countryside’, American Ethnologist 47(1): 10–26. Dzenovska, Dace and Daniel M. Knight. 2020. ‘Emptiness’, Cultural Anthropology, Theorizing the Contemporary. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from https:// culanth.org/fieldsights/series/emptiness. Gordon, Lewis G. 2015. ‘Disaster, Ruin, and Permanent Catastrophe’, in Christopher Dole, Robert Hayashi, Andrew Poe, Austin Sarat and Boris Wolfson (eds), The Time of Catastrophe: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Age of Catastrophe. London: Routledge, pp. 125–42. Graham, Dee. 1994. Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence and Women’s Lives. New York: New York University Press. Greenhouse, Carol. 2002. ‘Introduction: Altered States, Altered Lives’, in Carol J. Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz and Kay B. Warren (eds), Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gutiérrez Garza, Ana. 2018. ‘The Temporality of Illegality: Experiences of Undocumented Latin American Migrants in London’, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 81: 86–98. Henig, David. 2020. Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Knight, Daniel M. 2015a. History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.   2015b. ‘Wit and Greece’s Economic Crisis: Ironic Slogans, Food, and Antiausterity Sentiments’, American Ethnologist 42(2): 230–46.   2015c. ‘Opportunism and Diversification: Entrepreneurship and Livelihood Strategies in Uncertain Times’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 80(1): 117–44.   2017. ‘Energy Talk, Temporality, and Belonging in Austerity Greece’, Anthropological Quarterly 90(1): 167–91.   2020. ‘Emptiness and Chronic Crisis’, Cultural Anthropology, Theorizing the Contemporary. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://culanth.org/ fieldsights/emptiness-and-chronic-crisis.   2021. Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen. Oxford: Berghahn. Knight, Daniel M. and Charles Stewart. 2016. ‘Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe’, History and Anthropology 27(1): 1–18.

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Lepselter, Susan. 2016. The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.   2019. ‘Take Me Up, I Want to Go: Captivity, Disorientation and Affect in the Neurosphere’, History and Anthropology 30(5), 533–39. MacGaffey, Janet. 1987. Entrepreneurs and Parasites: The Struggle for Indigenous Capitalism in Zaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.   1998. Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law. Oxford: International African Institute. Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Namnyak M., N. Tufton,  R. Szekely,  M. Toal,  S. Worboys  and E.L. Sampson. 2008. ‘Stockholm Syndrome: Psychiatric Diagnosis or Urban Myth?’ Acta Psychiatrica Scandanavica 117: 4–11. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. London: Harvard University Press. Papadogiannis, Giannis. 2017. ‘To Sindromo tis Stokholmis, i Ellada kai ta capital controls pou den airontai’. I Kathimerini. Retrived 21 February 2022 from https://www.kathimerini.gr/902027/article/oikonomia/ellhnikh-oikonomia/ to-syndromo-ths-stokxolmhs-h-ellada-kai-ta-capital-controls-poy-denairontai. Pardo, Italo. 1996. Managing Existence in Naples: Morality, Action, and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pilevsky, Philip. 1989. Captive Continent: The Stockholm Syndrome in EuropeanSoviet relations. Westport, CT: Praeger. Pipyrou, Stavroula. 2014. ‘Cutting Bella Figura: Irony, Crisis, and Secondhand Clothes in South Italy’, American Ethnologist 41(3): 532–46. Pipyrou, Stavroula and Antonio Sorge. 2021. ‘Emergent Axioms of Violence: Toward an Anthropology of Post-Liberal Modernity’, Anthropological Forum 31(3): 225–40. Ringel, Felix. 2014. ‘Post-Industrial Times and the Unexpected: Endurance and Sustainability in Germany’s Fastest Shrinking City’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(S1): 52–70.   2018. Back to the Postindustrial Future: An Ethnography of Germany’s Fastest Shrinking City. Oxford: Berghahn. Roitman, Janet. 2013. Anti-Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shevchenko, Olga. 2009. Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Stewart, Charles. (ed.). 2014. Colonizing the Greek Mind? The Reception of Western Psychotherapeutics in Greece. Athens: DEREE, The American College of Greece. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. 2014. ‘On De-Pathologizing Resistance’, History and Anthropology 25(4): 415–30. Vigh, Henrik. 2008. ‘Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline’, Ethnos 73(1): 5–24. Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin.

Chapter 4

The Moria Catastrophe in Greece

An Anthropologically Informed Disaster Analysis of Refugee Reception in Europe Jutta Lauth Bacas

Introduction

D

uring the nights of 8 and 9 September 2020, on the island of Lesbos situated on the Greek–Turkish border, large fires took place that were reported all over the European press: the Moria refugee camp,1 which was the largest reception centre for asylum seekers and crisis migrants not only in Greece but also in Europe, was destroyed by huge fires – leaving nearly 10,000 people, including about 3,000 children, in shock and without shelter. ‘It’s a time bomb that finally exploded’, said Marco Sandrone of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), adding that people had been kept in ‘inhumane conditions’ at the site for years.2 The following chapter takes this tragic event as a starting point for further investigation and a critical analysis of what happened – and how and why this disaster occurred – with regard to refugee reception at Europe’s southeastern borders before the ‘time bomb exploded’. In light of the central themes of this edited volume, crisis and morality, the political framework in which the Moria refugee camp had been established, and the living conditions and omissions regarding refugee reception in Greece will be critically discussed in this anthropological case study. Through the prism of morality, my reflection on the multiple dimensions of this case is inspired by other stories with a moral, such as ancient Greek drama plays, which focus on historical or mythical themes and simultaneously have an underlying message. One of the fundamental questions dealt with by ancient Greek theatre, for example, is the

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responsibilities of leadership and the consequences of failure of leadership. In this respect, a reading of the Moria case as a story of leadership and failure may offer a wider perspective for our critical understanding of how the largest refugee camp in Europe ended up in ashes. In this contribution, which is situated in the context of transnational migration studies, a multiscalar analysis will be applied. As social anthropologists have pointed out (Glick Schiller 2015; Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2021; Ben-Yehoyada, Cabot and Silverstein 2020), a multiscalar analysis in this case would take into consideration the ongoing rearrangements of the governance of transnational refugees and migrants, and the constant changes in the infrastructure and legal framework(s) for their reception by national politics and international institutions. In my attempt to analyse these multiple layers of governance and shifting factors shaping refugee reception at the macro-, meso- and micro-levels, which laid the ground for the September 2020 catastrophe, I shall identify three dimensions of analysis. The case in point at the micro-level – analysed here by the anthropological approach of in-depth fieldwork and participant observation – is the Greek island of Lesbos opposite the Turkish mainland. The relevant meso-level in the present multiscalar analysis will critically discuss Greek governance practices, national regulations and bureaucratic procedures with regard to refugee reception and the processing of asylum claims according to national Greek law. Since Greece is an EU and Schengen member state the overarching macro-level, which my analysis will also take under consideration, is seen in the European migration and asylum policy (King and DeBono 2013). Although we cannot speak of a coherent European approach to migration and asylum (given the fact that the European Pact on Migration and Asylum – proposed by the European Commission in September 2020 – is still under discussion) multifold EU directives nevertheless set a common framework, which has to be respected and introduced into national law by all member states. Therefore, relevant European policies have to be taken into consideration, here focusing especially on the EU–Turkey agreement of 2016 as (another) turning point for border policing and forms of migration governance along the southeastern European border. In line with this multiscalar approach the first section (below) will introduce the reader to the EU–Turkey Statement on Protection and Reception of 18 March 2016. The concluding of this agreement between the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and representatives of the EU, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a leading figure, was presented not only as a milestone in European responses to the refugee crisis; it also considerably changed the national framework of refugee reception in Greece. Therefore, the second section of this chapter will

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critically analyse how the concluding of this agreement was significant for Greek migration policies and Greek practices of refugee reception on the ground. In the third section of this chapter, the implementation of the EU– Turkey agreement on remote Greek border islands, which were turned into ‘hotspots’ of refugee reception, will be critically discussed. The hotspot concept is of particular interest here since a new policy of managing refugee flows on Greek border islands was introduced, with problematic consequences on the ground. The hotspot concept totally changed the fate of people seeking refuge in Greece after fleeing militarized conflicts in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia. After crossing the Greek–Turkish sea border, newcomers and asylum seekers were restricted in their movements and ‘locked in’ to local reception centres where, due to overcrowding, highly problematic social conditions developed. Then, in the following section, the living conditions for refugees and crisis migrants after their arrival on Lesbos will be critically examined. An anthropologically informed report on the Moria refugee camp lies at the core of this section. In the closing section, the problematic social effects and human costs of EU ‘migration management’ after the conclusion of the EU–Turkey agreement will be critically evaluated. The worsening of the situation in the Lesbos refugee camp during the Covid-19 pandemic led to practices of degrading and inhumane treatment of newly arrived refugees and migrants, in which the individual needs and best interests of refugees and migrants – and their children – were systematically ignored. In 2020, during a strict and prolonged Covid-19 lockdown, refugees were met with inhumane treatment, lack of medical support, legal omissions in processing asylum claims and a substandard reception system. By carefully investigating these procedures and processes on the Greek border island from the perspective of those most affected in their personal lives, this chapter also presents an understanding of how ‘the time bomb exploded’: at some point, some makeshift homes and tents of refugees and crisis migrants – who felt squeezed, suppressed and desperate – caught fire. Heavy winds blowing that day over the Aegean Sea led to a very rapid spread of the fires, and finally led to the complete destruction of the Moria refugee camp.

What Is the EU-Turkey Statement of March 2016? This first section will introduce the reader to the EU–Turkey Statement of March 2016, which became central for governing migratory movement

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along the Eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey to Greece: why was this agreement contracted and what are some of its core elements? Looking back at movements of refugees and crisis migrants in the Eastern Mediterranean, irregular arrivals across the Mediterranean Sea had already been established as the main entry route from Turkey before 2013 (Lauth Bacas 2013a).3 In other words: the Greek border islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Kos had functioned as entry points into Europe for a number of years before the EU–Turkey agreement was contracted.4 Although after 2013 an increasing number of irregular migrants and refugees entered Greece by sea, nobody had foreseen what would happen on the border island of Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Kos from summer 2015 to March 2016, during a period that has been categorized by social scientists as the ‘long summer of migration’ (Hess et al. 2017). In this period the border island of Lesbos with its 80,000 inhabitants witnessed the arrival of more than a million desperate boat people, refugees and migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Syria, Iran and the Horn of Africa fleeing poverty, war and militarized conflicts. Looking at the year 2015 alone, a total of about 860,000 women, men and children managed to arrive in shaky inflatable dinghies on the Greek islands; nearly every second boat migrant arrived on the remote beaches of Lesbos.5 The majority moved on – to mainland Greece; next, along the co-called Balkan route to Western European countries such as Austria, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. After the closing of the land borders along the Balkan route in March 2016, irregular entries across the Greek–Turkish sea border remained a ‘loophole’ in Fortress Europe. In order to close this ‘entrance gate’ of irregular entries to the EU, three meetings between German Chancellor Merkel and Turkish President Erdoğan took place from October 2015 to March 2016. The October 2015 meeting saw Chancellor Angela Merkel seated next to the Turkish President on elaborately gilded golden ‘thrones’, a scene that draw international attention.6 Finally, on 18 March 2016 the EU–Turkey Statement was announced as a major tool for ‘managing’ the unwanted influx of refugees and crisis migrants across the Greek–Turkish sea border. The most important result of these meetings was an agreement to accept the rapid return to Turkey of all migrants not in need of international protection and all irregular migrants intercepted in Turkish waters.7 This was fixed in the announcement of the EU–Turkey Statement as its very first action point: ‘All new irregular migrants crossing from Turkey into Greek islands as from 20 March 2016 will be returned to Turkey.’ Thus, President Erdoğan became a key figure in the ‘political response’ of the EU to the refugee crisis by his

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agreement to take back Syrians and other migrants after their irregular entry into Greece. It was a win–win deal for both the EU and the Turkish government, since Action Point 6 of the common statement promised a speeding up of the disbursement of €3 billion for a project for Syrian refugees residing in Turkey – plus another €3 billion of funding in 2018 (Dimitriadi 2016: 4).8 The refugee crisis thus provided a window of opportunity for Turkey, which used its position as a transit country to successfully bargain for concessions and financial support in return for preventing departures or accepting returns of refugees and migrants (Bauböck 2018: 142). In a more general sense the EU–Turkey agreement also provides evidence for the analytical assumption that migration processes have to be investigated in transnational social fields, without our being imprisoned in the binary thinking of ‘receiving’ and ‘sending’ states (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2021). In the European Commission’s press release of 18 March 2016, the joint EU–Turkey Statement was presented as a tool ‘to break the business model of the smugglers and to offer migrants an alternative to putting their lives at risk’.9 Incorporated into this common statement was the recognition by the European Union of Turkey as ‘a first country of asylum’ and also a ‘safe third country’.10 This means that irregular migrants (who did not ask for asylum in Greece) as well as rejected asylum seekers from Syria or other countries of origin can be returned to Turkey legally, since they can find protection there. The recognition of Turkey as a ‘safe third country’ by the European Commission was another diplomatic success story for the Turkish government, although this classification provoked heavy debate and critical objections regarding the violation of acknowledged refugee rights from Amnesty International (2016), Human Rights Watch (2016a) and others. The EU–Turkey deal came into effect on 20 March 2016 and showed an immediate impact on refugee and boat migrants’ arrivals on Greek border islands. As police data prove, the incoming flow of small rubber boats reduced drastically. Especially in the first months and years of its existence, European politicians praised the EU–Turkey agreement as a success story. For example, the progress report of the European Commission of September 2016 acknowledges that ‘the implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement has continued to deepen and to accelerate’.11 Looking at this appraisal one has to keep in mind the fact that the EU–Turkey agreement is exclusively related to clandestine migration across the Aegean Sea. The land border in northern Greece had not been included in the common statement with the result that irregular migrants and asylum seekers who entered Greece in the north of the country – across the Evros River – would not be accepted back by Turkey.

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Table 4.1. Irregular arrivals in Greece, 2014–2020. YEAR

Irregular SeaIrregular LandPersons Dead Border Crossings Border Crossings or Missing to Greece to Greece (IOM)*

2020 (Covid-19– related lockdown)

10,434

9,849

2019

65,963

17,370

71

2018

34,014

22,547

174

2017

34,732

7,587

62

2016 (after EU– Turkey Statement)

21,998

3,784 (in total)

434 (in total)

2016 (before EU– Turkey Statement)

151,452

n.d.

n.d.

2015

856,723

4,907

803

2014

4,038

2,280

101

106

* International Organization for Migration Source: FRONTEX Annual Risk Analysis 2021, Annex Table 3. Illegal Border-Crossing_ detentions on entry at the Eastern Mediterranean Route (Sea and Land Borders); Data on Dead or Missing Migrants on the Eastern Mediterranean Route: see IOM Missing Migrants Project, retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean.

As Greek data of 2017 and later reveal, land-border crossings in the Evros region increased, including rising numbers of political refugees from Turkey itself. Table 4.1 looks more analytically at the development of sea-border and land-border crossings in Greece during the period 2014–20, based on official data on apprehensions after irregular entry to Greece. At first sight, data show the extraordinary increase in sea-border arrivals during the large summer of migration in 2015. After the EU– Turkey Statement of March 2016, the numbers also reveal a significant drop in irregular entries across the maritime border in the period following the announcement. As official data based on the detections and the sea border illustrate, in the first three months of 2016 – before the EU– Turkey Statement – a total of 151,452 irregular entries to Aegean border islands took place. After the EU–Turkey Statement entered into force on 20 March 2016, the figures dropped considerably – a development also related to the increased patrolling by the Turkish Coast Guard as agreed upon in the context of the EU–Turkey agreement: until the end of 2016 only 21,998 irregular maritime entries were registered along the Greek side of the border. However, this stabilizing effect was not long lasting:

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in 2017 a total of 34,732 detentions after irregular sea-border crossings took place on Aegean border islands (European Stability Initiative 2019: 3). Also in the following year, 2018, a total of 34,014 irregular border crossers were officially registered in Greece. By the end of 2019, though, the increase in arrivals on the Aegean border islands was so significant that the Greek Minister of Migration issued a public warning, also addressing his European counterparts: the number of irregular entries across the country’s maritime borders had nearly doubled in comparison with the past year, and reached in 2019 a total of 65,963 boat migrants arriving in an irregular manner on Lesbos, Chios, Samos and other Aegean islands.12 The social consequences of this boom will be discussed in the following section: the complete overcrowding of the local reception centres on Lesbos, Chios, Samos, etc., where capacities for asylum seekers could in no way meet the growing demand for shelter and support. In 2020, the maritime migratory flows from Turkey to Greece were clearly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic – which made irregular crossings of the Aegean Sea more arduous, with the result that irregular arrivals dropped significantly. A total of 10,434 refugees and migrants managed to arrive clandestinely on Greek border islands in 2020. This decrease in relation to the previous year is quite remarkable, and most probably related to Covid-19-related lockdowns and restrictions of movement in place both in Turkey and Greece. But how this tendency will develop after a future flattening of the pandemic is quite unpredictable: irregular migratory flows often vary and are characterized by high levels of fluctuation. By spring 2021, the Executive Director of the European border agency FRONTEX, Fabrice Leggeri, had already launched an early warning, saying, ‘I am sure that after Corona more refugees will try to come to Europe again’.13 Altogether, five years after the EU–Turkey agreement came into effect, one has to admit that the Greek–Turkish sea border has not been sealed off; though in smaller numbers, refugees and migrants continued to arrive in small rubber boats on Greek border islands. From March 2016 to March 2021, the Greek authorities have detained and officially registered about 150,000 refugees and migrants after irregular sea-border crossings. In other words, despite the EU–Turkey refugee deal irregular migration via the Eastern Mediterranean route continued non-stop – involving some 150,000 men, women and children who had fled war, militarized conflicts and persecution in crisis-driven countries such as Afghanistan or Syria, or in eastern Africa. This figure of 150,000 newly registered asylum seekers should be understood in relation to the population structure and the social

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situation of the receiving country. Greece, with a total population of 10.8 million inhabitants, includes about ten large cities: the Athens area ranks first with around 3.8 million inhabitants, followed by smaller cities like Thessaloniki, Patras and Heraklion. In comparison with such middle-range urban centres, the group of new refugees and migrants having arrived from 2016 to 2021 would itself constitute a ‘new’ city that would rank fifth in the list of cities in Greece. The newcomer population – initially dispersed on small border islands – was in need of shelter, food, sanitary installations and medical care: a huge task for a small country that had itself been strongly affected by a national debt crisis and harsh austerity measures since 2010 (see Knight this volume), and more recently by the negative economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even during the Covid-19 lockdown, when transnational movements and regular border crossings between Turkey and Greece were extremely restricted, irregular migration to Greece went on (albeit in very small numbers). What has happened to these numerous asylum seekers and crisis migrants who have arrived on remote border islands in the past five years? Here is the interesting answer: the majority, in the end, left the Aegean islands heading west. About 100,000 persons initially registered in ‘hotspots’ on Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Kos and Leros were allowed to move to the Greek mainland due to their classification as vulnerable (according to Greek asylum law). We will shed more light on these arranged transfers to the Greek mainland in the section below, ‘What Happened on Lesbos …’. As of March 2021, about 10,000 people are still living in refugee-reception centres on the Greek border islands in ‘standby’ mode, waiting for a decision on their pending asylum applications. Last but not least, what can be said about returns to Turkey in the period under consideration? Such returns constituted the key element of the EU–Turkey refugee deal, which stated that all irregular migrants crossing from Turkey into the Greek islands would be returned to Turkey. Statistical data released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) allow an evaluation of the bilateral readmission consensus. In the year 2020, before the closing of EU–Turkish borders due to the Covid-19 pandemic, only 139 forced returns to Turkey took place under the framework of the EU–Turkey agreement.14 Looking at the overall period from March 2016 to March 2020, a total of 2,140 persons have been returned in the framework of the common EU–Turkey Statement. In plain figures, 1.4 per cent of refugees and migrants who landed on Greek border islands from March 2016 to March 2020 have been accepted back and returned to Turkey as a ‘safe third country’.

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The EU–Turkey agreement was never administratively withdrawn but practically came to a halt on 19 March 2020, when Turkey officially closed its borders to Greece during the Covid-19 pandemic (See Lauth Bacas 2020: 59ff). In the following period from March 2020 to March 2021 under the conditions of the Covid-19 crisis, no voluntary returns (of persons who had withdrawn their asylum applications) or forced returns (of persons whose asylum applications had been rejected) to Turkey took place at all.15 The reality check presented here clearly demonstrates that one of the core elements of the EU–Turkey Statement – namely, readmissions and returns to Turkey – could not meet the high expectations and the goal announced five years previously: to end the irregular migration flow from Turkey to the EU. In other words, the EU–Turkey agreement neither succeeded in ending the constant entries of refugees and migrants across the Greek–Turkish border nor reduced the loads and costs for Greece as a country of first reception. At the end of the period under consideration irregular entries into Greece had been substantially reduced, but nevertheless a whole ‘city’ of 150,000 desperate newcomers, refugees and crisis migrants had arrived and provisionally established themselves in Greece.

What Happened in Greece after the Contracting of the EU–Turkey Refugee Agreement? The following section will focus on the implementation of the EU–Turkey statement with regard to changes occurring along the Greek–Turkish sea border. The maritime border line between Greece and Turkey, which was agreed in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne, lies exactly in the middle of the maritime strait that divides the Greek islands of Lesbos, Chis, Samos and Kos from the Turkish mainland opposite (Lauth Bacas 2014). The Turkish section of the strait is monitored by the Turkish Coast Guard, which started intensified patrolling of the maritime channel to Greece as an immediate response to the joint EU–Turkey Statement.16 Looking at the first quarter of 2016, the Turkish Coast Guard Command officially reported 494 cases of small boats attempting to leave Turkish territorial waters without permission and a total of 22,783 persons apprehended.17 In the following three quarters of 2016, the EU– Turkey Statement had some deterrent effect on crisis migrants attempting to leave Turkey. After the media had widely reported that irregular migrants would be returned to Turkey, fewer people dared to cross the maritime border irregularly and fewer rubber boats were seized

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in Turkish territorial waters. As Turkish data show, the total number of irregular migration incidents at the Turkish sea border dropped after the refugee deal to 339 cases in the period between April and December 2016.18 Strengthened Turkish patrolling also showed results on the Greek side of the Aegean border. In the first quarter of 2016, about 150,000 refugees and boat migrants managed to arrive on Greek shores. In the following three quarters of 2016, from April until the end of the year, approximately 22,000 boat people arrived on the Aegean border islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Leros and Kos. The threatening and deterring effect of being stuck on a Greek island (according to Hess and Kasparek 2017) weakened over time, whereas the pressure to flee war and persecution in crisis countries persisted with the result that the numbers of irregular arrivals to Greek border islands rose in 2018 and doubled in 2019 (see Table 4.1), putting national reception capacities under increased pressure as well. In Greece the reception of asylum seekers and boat migrants who had crossed the sea border in small, flimsy craft was orchestrated by national laws and regulations that were directly related to the EU–Turkey deal. In the following section we will shed light on some key aspects of the implementation of this agreement at the national level in Greece. Although Greece had played a weak role in the diplomatic phase of the deal when Merkel and Erdoğan negotiated the EU–Turkey Statement (Elitok 2019: 9), the agreement has to be understood as the sine qua non with regard to Greek legislation on asylum and migration governance. On 30 March 2016 the Greek government under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras hastily introduced a new asylum law (Dimitriadi 2016: 5). Central to this new legislation was the institutionalization of the ‘hot-spot approach’ in managing irregular maritime entries: reception, registration and the examination of an asylum claim would be processed primarily on the island of first arrival. The new law also institutionalized the cooperation of the relevant Greek authorities (Hellenic Police, Hellenic Coast Guard) with the European Union and its agencies. Four key EU agencies – the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of member states (FRONTEX), the European Police (Europol) and the European Judicial Cooperation Unit (Eurojust) – started to cooperate in Greek hotspots at the local level (Painter et al. 2016). From the time when compulsory returns of ‘all new irregular migrants’ to Turkey were possible, the ‘hotspot’ approach was also central for managing cases of negative asylum decisions. The idea was that after March 2016 rejected asylum applicants could be sent from the island of first arrival back to Turkey. As argued earlier in this chapter, this

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concept, which was criticized for refugee-rights violations from the very start, barely worked in the first five years of its existence. Some authors (Stavropolou 2015; Dimitriadi 2016: 6) have argued that the Greek Asylum Service was initially unprepared for processing increased numbers of asylum applications on the Aegean islands, and later worked too inefficiently and hesitantly to request returns under the EU–Turkey Statement (Knaus 2021: 193f). Another element central to the new hotspot concept was the socalled geographical restriction: before the EU–Turkey agreement, newly arrived boat migrants were free to depart for Athens, creating in 2015 a constant flow of irregular arrivals followed by regular departures to the Greek mainland. With the incorporation of the EU–Turkey Statement into Greek law a new restriction on movement (the so-called geographical restriction) was implemented, prohibiting asylum applicants on Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Kos and Leros from leaving those islands for the duration of the examination of their asylum claims. This geographical restriction was clearly thought of as a bureaucratic barrier against politically unwanted departures from the island and secondary movements to mainland Greece. In effect, it created a bottleneck on the border islands with regard to processing asylum claims and offering appropriate reception conditions during the examination process. Not surprisingly, after ongoing refugee arrivals on the border islands local reception centres became unable to provide adequate support, shelter or medical care to the growing numbers of waiting asylum applicants. By beginning of October 2016 the capacities for crisis migrants and asylum seekers living under the new geographical restriction in the five Aegean hotspots were clearly not meeting rising demand. In the Lesbos hotspot the planned capacity was 3,500 people, whereas in fact 5,966 persons had to live there in October 2016. In the Chios hotspot the official capacity was 1,100 places but in fact 3,884 refugees and migrants were squeezed in there in autumn 2016. In the hotspot of Kos, the capacity of 1,100 places was faced with the actual presence of 1,858 newly arrived boat migrants (Knaus 2016: 45). This discrepancy between capacities foreseen by the Greek authorities and the de facto infrastructure needed on Aegean border islands after the institutional establishment of the hotspot approach is striking.19 Six months after the refugee deal came into effect, by October 2016, four of the five Greek hotspots were already completely overcrowded, hosting twice as many refugees and migrants as initially intended. Since four sizable EU agencies were present at each of these hotspots, the European Commission was probably familiar with the conditions of overcrowding in Greek reception centres from the very beginning.

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But the focus of its public communication – for example, in the Progress Reports of the Commission – was elsewhere: ‘The implementation of the EU – Turkey Statement is delivering results’, the Commission proudly announced in September 2016.20 On the other hand, numerous critical voices from international NGOs and European civil society pointed to the malfunctioning of the hotspots and the inhumane conditions of refugee reception. Human Rights Watch strongly attacked the EU–Turkey agreement as violating basic human rights (Human Rights Watch 2016b). Looking back at the initial phase of implementing the EU–Turkey agreement in Greece, it is striking to note that overcrowding at the level of a doubling of numbers in the reception facilities occurred straight away but that the Greek government departments responsible for the management of the hotspots neglected to schedule sufficient improvements in the reception centres on the Aegean islands. This non-action on the part of responsible authorities will be taken up in the last section of the article, since it is related to a more general dimension of our analysis: the question of morality. In the following years, the constant flow of irregular arrivals on Greek border islands led repeatedly to overcrowding. Greek authorities and the large EU agencies present at sites like Moria on Lesbos were not reacting sufficiently (or, as some critics say, not reacting at all). Substandard conditions in refugee reception also remained a key problem in the following years as local reception facilities (funded by the EU) continued to be overcrowded and dramatically malfunctioning. As researchers of the new Greek border/order have repeatedly argued, a significant gap between ‘the laws and real life’ could be observed in Greece in the sense that administrative practices of reception and the processing of asylum applications never sufficiently met the needs on the ground (Ilias et al. 2019: 7).

What Happened on Lesbos after the Signing of the EU–Turkey Refugee Agreement? From the very start in 2016, the EU–Turkey agreement – with the clear purpose of notably reducing irregular entries of boat migrants into Greece – had a massive impact on the system of refugee reception at the local level. In this section of the chapter, the focus will be on the circumstances and conditions of refugee reception on Lesbos as a case in point. This Aegean island is at the centre of the following analysis because in the past decade nearly every second refugee or crisis migrant

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Figure 4.1. Fenced section of RIC Moria on Lesbos. Photograph © Jutta Lauth Bacas.

who entered Greece via the Eastern Mediterranean route chose Lesbos as his/her entryway to Europe. After the EU–Turkey agreement came into effect a camp inside a former military base near the small village of Moria was officially renamed Reception and Identification Centre Moria (RIC Moria). Independent reports from Lesbos already provide proof of overcrowding problems in RIC Moria in the very first months of its operation: in May 2016 about 3,500 persons were living in the Moria refugee camp after irregular arrival (Kuster and Tsianos 2016: 16). By October 2016 RIC Moria was hosting 5,966 refugees and migrants instead of the intended 3,500 persons (Knaus 2016: 45). In other words, in the first months of its operation the containers of RIC Moria were already unable to house everyone – and additional containers and tents had to be set up inside the fenced camp. In 2017, just one year after the EU–Turkey agreement, clandestine crossings of the Aegean sea border had increased again. This expansion also had a direct effect on raising the numbers of irregular arrivals on Lesbos, as Table 4.2 indicates. The data presented also show, next to a peak in 2019, the strong influence of the coronavirus crisis on migratory trends along the Eastern Mediterranean route since 2020: the number

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of arrivals dropped due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the restrictions on movements put in place both in Turkey and Greece, which made clandestine border crossings more difficult (but as argued above, the pandemic might not have a lasting effect on transnational migration on the Eastern Mediterranean route). Who were the people arriving in 2017, one year after the EU–Turkey agreement came in effect? According to the Hellenic Police, refugees and migrants entering Greece irregularly across the land and sea borders came from more than a dozen countries and territories – from Algeria to Hong Kong. Syrians formed the largest group (16,500 persons) registered for irregular entry to Greece in 2017. The second-largest group was composed of about 9,300 undocumented migrants coming from Pakistan, third were 8,500 persons fleeing from Iraq and fourth about 4,800 persons stating their origin as Afghanistan (Hellenic Police 2017). Based on this data, a clear connection can be drawn between social constraints and pressures to leave one’s country because of war, militarized conflict or authoritarian political regimes and clandestine entry into European countries such as Greece as a supposed safe haven. King and De Bono also argued that, numerically, Syrians and Afghans had superseded those from other countries of origin because of civil wars in the Middle East and Central Asia (King and DeBono 2013: 14). In the period under consideration the basic bureaucratic procedure after clandestine arrival remained more or less the same in RIC Moria. When newcomers entered the Moria refugee centre they were first registered and fingerprinted by the Greek Police. At that point also an asylum claim could be lodged; later a more formal assessment of the nationalities of the newly arrived persons by FRONTEX border-police officers Table 4.2. Arrivals on Lesbos Island, 2017–2020. YEAR

Sea-Border Crossing to Greece

Irregular Arrivals on Lesbos

2020

10, 434

4,710

2019

65,963

26,974

2018

34,014

14,969

2017

34,732

11,973

2016 after the statement 21,998

5,966

Sources: FRONTEX Annual Risk Analysis 2021, Annex Table 3. Illegal BorderCrossing_ detentions on entry at the Eastern Mediterranean Route (Sea and Land Borders); Data on Arrivals on Lesbos Island see: Aegean Boat Report Data Studio: numbers by islands. See: www.aegeanboatreport.com, retrieved 22 February 2022.

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took place.21 Some days (or sometimes months) after arrival a medical screening by a Greek doctor was conducted, which also included the assessment of the vulnerability of an asylum seeker. Residents of the camp call this appointment the ‘yes or no doctor’. When a person qualified as vulnerable, he or she was allowed to leave the island for vulnerability reasons; in other words: ‘yes’! When a person did not qualify as vulnerable, she/he had to remain on the island until the Greek Asylum Service delivered a decision on the pending application. This was an important decision. If an asylum seeker was not qualified as vulnerable he/she was not permitted to travel to the Greek mainland and had to stay on the island for many months – often, more than a year. Therefore, the notion of vulnerability as laid out in Greek Law 4375/2016 was crucial to everybody residing in the camp since it altered the trajectory of each and every applicant waiting for a decision on her/ his asylum case. Under Greek law ‘vulnerability’ has a precise legal definition that includes asylum applicants who fall under the following categories (Kuster and Tsianos 2016): unaccompanied minors; singleparent families with underage children; persons with disabilities and/ or chronic diseases; persons over 65 years of age; victims of trafficking, rape or sexual exploitation; victims of torture or inhumane and degrading treatment; victims of female gentile mutilation; and pregnant women and women six months after giving birth. In consideration of their special needs vulnerable persons are transferred from Lesbos or from other Aegean islands to mainland Greece under the auspices of the UNHCR Greece (or allowed to organize their departures themselves without the issuing of an asylum decision). Under Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (2015–19), transfers of registered asylum applicants and their families to mainland Greece due to their vulnerability status started soon after the EU–Turkey Statement was concluded. These transfers had not been foreseen in the bilateral agreement, which was focusing on securitization, quick procedures and returns to Turkey. But when adjusting Greek asylum law in April 2016, the Greek parliament introduced a new paragraph granting exception from the geographical restriction for asylum applicants in need of special protection. By doing so, the Greek parliament introduced a humanitarian feature and the clearly defined humanitarian criterion of vulnerability into the national asylum process, which had not been anticipated by the EU–Turkey agreement. In 2017 UNHCR Greece stepped into the national reception procedures by organizing transfers to mainland Greece and accompanying vulnerable persons on ferries to Piraeus. The transits were also documented in the statistics of UNHCR Greece, presenting a clear picture

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not only of growing numbers of irregular arrivals on Aegean islands but also, at the same time, of the growing numbers of transfers to the mainland. These transfers were legal procedures according to Greek law because the persons involved had lodged their asylum application and therefore were permitted to stay legally in the country as long as their application was still in process. Table 4.3 looks at regular transfers of vulnerable persons to mainland Greece in relation to irregular arrivals in the period 2016–20. The data reveal a constant incoming flow of refugees and migrants, which was also met by the Greek government with procedures of outgoing transfers to mainland Greece (where registered asylum applicants were housed in organized camps and rented flats in cooperation with UNHCR Greece). By the end of 2018, 6,950 refugees and migrants were already registered in RIC Moria. Another 27,974 arrivals on Lesbos during 2019 caused the camp’s population throughout the year grow to a total of about 35,000 inhabitants. This amount is equal to the number of inhabitants of Mytilini, the island’s capital – unforeseen, another unofficial ‘town’ of refugees and migrants had developed on this small border island. The infrastructure of RIC Moria (with its initial design of 2,840 places) could by no means cover this huge increase in social demands, with the result that – between other omissions – the fresh-water supply was cut except for a few hours every day. Next to the relevant increase in irregular arrivals in 2019 the data also show how transfers from Lesbos increased: in 2019, about 18,000 vulnerable asylum seekers in need of special care were allowed to move to mainland Greece. In other words, due to authorized decisions by the Greek Asylum Service, in 2019 roughly every second resident of RIC Moria was able to leave Lesbos towards Europe. Such transfers were legitimate procedures according to Greek law because the persons involved had lodged their asylum applications and therefore were permit to stay legally in the country Table 4.3. Transfers from Lesbos to the Greek mainland, 2016–2020. LESBOS

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

Irreg. Arrivals*

5,966

11,973

14,969

26,974

4,710

Transfers

n.d.

5,898

15,207

17,817

16,573

RIC Capacitiy

3,000

2,840

2,840

2,840

2,840

6,860

6,950

20,785

9,189 **

Persons on 31/12

* after March 2016 ** in Kará Tepé Source: UNHCR Operational Portal; Aegean Boat Report Data Studio: numbers by islands. See: www.aegeanboatreport.com, retrieved 22 February 2022.

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as long as their application was still in process. Therefore, the image of Lesbos as a ‘prison island’ (Bosiou 2020) is not appropriate since numerous transfers from the island, based on the criterion of vulnerability, were part of the refugee reception process. I have so far applied a multiscalar approach to this case study, which has analysed the complex texture of national and supra-state features of control structures on a Greek border island. The previous sections have highlighted how the governance of refugee arrivals on Lesbos was influenced and orchestrated both by policing strategies and mechanisms developed on the macro-level of EU regulations and EU–Third-partner agreements as well as on the meso-level of national policing and the implementation of relevant changes in Greek asylum law. In our critical reconstruction we have underlined the role of transfers of vulnerable asylum seekers to the Greek mainland as a relevant turning point in their transnational migration process. Our data-based reality check of irregular migration flows to Lesbos has also shown that irregular entries to the island had reached a new peak in 2019. In exactly this period, I conducted fieldwork on Lesbos and at the Moria refugee camp. What follows is an ethnographic report focusing on the micro-level of everyday survival in an overcrowded refugee camp, which to its residents was much more than just a processing centre – being also a social place in which to live and to keep up resilience and hope.

Camp Moria, September 2019 I parked my car sideways on the rural island road next to some olive groves. The weather was still hot by the beginning of September 2019, when I reached the hilly area close to the village of Moria. When I walked towards the numerous two-storey metal containers forming the refugee-reception centre, which carries the name of the nearby village Moria, I remembered a number of earlier visits to detention centres for refugees and boat migrants set up on Lesbos in previous years. I had seen all of them during earlier periods of fieldwork. My first encounters with refugees and asylum applicants took place in 2005, 2008 and 2010 at the Pagani detention centre in Mytilini, which had been set up in a deserted factory building (see Lauth Bacas 2008, 2010, 2013a: 277). In October 2009 the Pagani detention centre was officially closed due to strong criticism of its inhumane living conditions, but it was still operating unofficially during my following field visit in 2010 (Lauth Bacas 2013a: 279). In 2013, during my next fieldwork period, a flimsy detention area was in operation inside the premises of Mytilini harbour

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(Lauth Bacas 2014) until the first shipment with container units arrived for the planned RIC Moria by the end of 2013. On this border island, the detainment of refugees and boat migrants had a long history. In September 2019 my aim was to visit the Moria site once more since it had turned into largest refugee camp in Europe, hosting more than ten thousand at that time. I knew that the official section of the camp, called by the Greek authorities ‘RIC Moria’, was surrounded by walls and fences; Greek police guarded the official entrances. Entry was denied to visitors, journalists or observers like me. This time I had decided not to ask for permission to enter the guarded RIC Moria refugee centre, which had been in operation since 2014. In previous years I had gained permission to access the Pagani detention centre with its locked compounds (photographs in Lauth Bacas 2013a: 265f). During those earlier visits to Pagani I had been accompanied, or at least received, by Greek police guarding the detention centre – a fact more (in 2005) or less (in 2008) limiting my possibilities to talk to asylum applicants living there. In September 2019 I wanted to avoid any ‘official’ company and decided to visit the ‘Olive Grove’, the unfenced area outside the walls of RIC Moria, where asylum seekers and migrants were living in additional small tents and makeshift dwellings. I entered this unfenced and unguarded area using a small agricultural road leading upwards into the hilly part of the ‘Olive Grove’, which was what refugees and locals called the makeshift settlement outside the walls of the former military camp. I walked into the area of the ‘Olive Grove’ on a path covered with gravel to stabilize the ground. To my left and right a number of large, grey UNHCR family tents had been erected; in front of their entrances I saw pairs of children’s sandals and adults’ shoes neatly set up. At the end of the pathway a group of about ten young men, wearing orange jackets with the logo of the NGO ‘Movement on the Ground’, were paving and preparing the soil for some reason. I asked them for permission to take some pictures and learned that the group was leveling the ground to set up two more family tents, since newcomers had arrived in the past few days in need of shelter. The month of September had always been a peak period in irregular arrivals on Lesbos and other Aegean border islands (Lauth Bacas 2013a; 2014) since weather conditions were still suitable for crossing the sea border successfully. It seemed striking that volunteers from a Dutch NGO, rather than representatives of the Greek government managing RIC Moria, were preparing space and setting up tents for the newcomers. When I asked the men, ‘Can you tell me more about the situation here?’ they sent me to speak to Sofia22 in the ‘Office’, a container situated uphill. After entering that container I explained the reasons for my visit

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Figure 4.2. Tents in Zone 7 of the ‘Olive Grove’. Photograph © Jutta Lauth Bacas.

to a young non-Greek volunteer in her twenties sitting at one of the two office desks. Sofia replied that the ‘Olive Grove’ Site Manager (employed by a Dutch NGO) was expected in half an hour and would probably be willing to give me an explanatory tour around the site. One of the three chairs in the sparsely furnished container was not taken and I was able to take a place in a corner, immersing myself in the setting and quietly listening to the counselling Sofia provided to three young male residents of the ‘Olive Grove’. One of them expected Sofia’s support in order to have his name placed on a list of transfers to mainland Greece that were expected to take place on another day: a big topic since thousands of vulnerable persons were waiting for a passage to Piraeus. Another young man complained that his asylum-applicant ‘Pink Card’ and other identity documents had been stolen from his tent; due to the theft, his asylum case number (written on the Pink Card) had got lost and he could no longer provide proof that he had lodged an asylum application. A third young asylum seeker was worried about the renewal of his ‘RIC Resident Card’, which was valid for six months but was needed for the small allowance provided by the UNHCR to asylum applicants in Moria. Patiently, Sofia noted down each of the requests on her laptop (decorated with various stickers – her private one?), which was the only electronic device in the office.

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After some waiting and the Site Manager not showing up I decided to leave the office, telling Sofia that I would take a stroll and return later. I continued to walk uphill along the asphalt road following the wall surrounding the official section of the Moria refugee camp. The narrow road had become the main passage to numerous small tents, which asylum seekers and their families had set up in the hilly olive grove next to the road. The Greek authorities had registered all of them; therefore, they were entitled to partake of the food supply provided in RIC Moria. But obviously, shelter was insufficient for the many thousand registered asylum seekers; thousands of people had to queue for packed meals for long hours day after day. When I stopped opposite one of the openings cut in the fence of the formal RIC to take a picture of this makeshift ‘door’, a slim young man crossed the way; unintentionally I took a closeup photograph of his face. I dropped the camera and said to him, ‘Oh sorry, I took a picture of you’. He passed by and answered, ‘No problem, it doesn’t matter’ – ‘No, no’, I insisted, ‘I shall delete that picture’. I turned to him, showed him my camera’s screen, deleted the last photo shot and told him, ‘It’s gone’. He stopped his ongoing motion, turned to me and asked, ‘Where are you from?’ – ‘From Germany’, my immediate reply. He looked into my eyes, saying, ‘Guten Morgen’. The chap knew German. From our following conversation I learned that he had lived and worked legally in the Ruhr area of Germany as an asylum applicant, but had had to leave the country after a couple of years because of two negative decisions on his asylum claim. After the rejection he decided to move back to Iraq. Back home he tried to start a new life and got married; but there he received severe threats because of his former life (as he said). When his wife became pregnant they decided to leave Iraq together because of the bitter enmity he and his wife (with an uncle living in Germany) were facing in their home town in Iraq. They crossed Turkey; they crossed the Aegean Sea; then he and his pregnant wife lodged an asylum application on Lesbos island because, as he assumed, ‘Greece is friendlier to refugees than Germany’.23 He continued, ‘My wife is hiding in our small tent all day, because she is so afraid of the place, of the threatening atmosphere and the dirt everywhere. How long, do you think it will take until we get our papers?’ Being familiar with the long-standing bureaucratic procedures of the Greek Asylum Service, I didn’t want to spread too much optimism and replied, ‘I don’t really know – at least a year, I guess’. Surprisingly, this seemed good news to him: ‘That’s OK; we are still young’. Moving upwards beyond the asphalt street another extension of the camp began with an earth road leading to more tents, more canvas-made structures harbouring mostly Afghan families. In the shade of a wall a

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construction had been erected with blankets and curtains, shielding a hole dug into the ground. Three Afghan women with headscarves were bending or kneeling behind the curtains around this earth hole; another refugee woman approached the curtain. I didn’t understand what this was until a female hand reached out to the woman outside the curtain and handed over two oval-shaped pieces of flatbread: seemingly this was a little bakery for naan, the national bread of Afghanistan, baked in a tandoor, a cylindrical earth furnace. Another refugee woman arrived, bought two pieces of fresh naan bread, paid and left. I came closer and showed my little camera, asking for their permission to take some photographs. The refugee women working in the bakery did not pause or look into my camera, but continued to shape the oval loaves and then stuck them to the interior wall of the oven to bake them. When I lowered my camera after several shots one of the women took something out of the hot earth furnace, rose to her feet and handed a small loaf of warm flatbread to me: her generous gift to a foreigner with whom she wanted to share what little she had produced. I was really moved: the only portrait photo I shot that day in the camp was a ‘selfie’ holding this unexpected gift. When I returned to the container office to meet Sofia she told me she had time to show me around the premises of Zone 7, which was monitored by the NGO ‘Movement on the Ground’. This zone outside RIC Moria with twenty-five large tents was (at the time of my visit) hosting five hundred people. As Sofia explained, ‘Movement on the Ground’ had installed electricity, floodlights and internet access for residents of Zone 7 with funding from international donors. The NGO volunteers also had changed the way food and water was distributed there. In order to avoid long queuing each resident tent had appointed a delegate who would collect food and water for all their peers in the tents. ‘So instead of having 500 people waiting, we only have around 50 people in line’, Sofia explained. In addition, a voluntary gardening project had been set up using inexpensive euro pallets to grow some aromatic greens or cherry tomatoes; refugee volunteers had also constructed a central meeting place in Zone 7 with wooden benches for common use, roofed with large panels of fabric for sun protection. Our tour had nearly ended; Sofia (representing ‘Movement on the Ground’) and I stood chatting on the path along which I had initially entered, when an elderly Afghan man, who had been resting on a provisional daybed in front of his tent, approached us. The grey-haired Afghan formally shook hands first with Sofia and with me, then he presented and offered a slice of hand-made dried cheese to each of us – probably produced from local sheep milk and a lot of salt, dried in the

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summer’s heat. We thanked him warmly and Sofia explained a bit later that he was the elderly ‘leader’ or spokesperson of the Afghan refugee community residing in Zone 7. Having observed us, having observed me for some time, he decided to approach us and to present a welcome gift. Many eyes had seen me walking through the ‘Olive Grove’, had witnessed me talking to people and watched my steps. Finally, the greyhaired spokesperson of the Afghan community approached me with a formal handshake and a gift in an attempt to constitute a relationship through hospitality.24 A few hours previously I had entered the ‘jungle’ with mixed feelings of stress and some anxiety, not knowing what I was expecting to find there. Later in the afternoon of that day in September 2019 I returned to my car as a ‘honoured guest’, who had been cordially welcomed by refugees who had lost everything but not their hospitality. Twelve months later extended fires damaged both Camp Moria and the adjacent makeshift settlements housing thousands of asylum seekers and war refugees. The family tents and the infrastructure of Zone 7 in the ‘Olive Grove’, the place that I had witnessed and which by chance had survived the first round of fires on 8 September 2020, was completely destroyed by fires the following night.

Crisis and Morality: How ‘The Time Bomb’ Exploded In 2020, the EU–Turkey Statement, which prohibited refugees and migrants from leaving Lesbos as long as their application for asylum was being processed, was still in effect. Due to the continuing increase of irregular arrivals during that year RIC Moria clearly became overstressed and overcrowded, turning into a bottleneck instead of a shortterm transit centre. By the beginning of 2020, a total of 20,785 persons were blocked there under the eyes of the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum, the Hellenic Police, the EU border agency FRONTEX, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and UNHCR. Again, only a small number of the newcomers could be sheltered in container buildings inside the walled section of the camp. In winter 2019/2020 about 15,000 asylum seekers – men, women and children – were living in the adjacent area of the ‘Olive Grove’ in UNHCR-provided family tents, improvised camping tents or makeshift constructions covered with plastic foil – dispersed across agricultural plots belonging to farmers of nearby Moria village. In fact the RIC Moria refugee centre – still bearing the name of the neighbouring village of Moria with its roughly 900 Greek inhabitants – had turned into the second-largest settlement on Lesbos. However,

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the camp provided no infrastructure to its stressed inhabitants: no village square, no roads or paved paths, no schools or kindergarten, no electricity or lighting at night. Numerous journalists and humanrights organizations reported again and again on the deplorable state of affairs on Europe’s doorstep: a central point was the mismanagement in food supply whereby endless queuing was necessary day after day to receive packed meals for breakfast, lunch and supper (provided by catering companies with the cheapest offer). NGOs and international media also reported on missing waste management (and garbage piling up everywhere) and the bleak sanitary infrastructure; the toilets and showers were extremely unsanitary. This situation was characterized as ‘The Shame of Europe’ by Jean Ziegler, the former Vice-President of the Advisory Committee to the UN Human Rights Council, in February 2020. As Ziegler (2020) and others argued, the basic needs of asylum applicants and crisis refugees were never properly addressed despite repeated public criticisms with regard to limited water and electricity supply, poor sanitation, lack of food and prevailing violence. Due to the long waits until the Greek authorities finally delivered asylum decisions, Camp Moria became in effect a long-term migrant camp without the necessary infrastructure. Living conditions further deteriorated in spring 2020 after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Greece (Lauth Bacas 2020: 60f). After the first Covid-19 death occurred on Lesbos in March 2020 (affecting a local Greek), fear was spreading in Mytilini as well as in the refugee camp. RIC Moria, like all other refugee camps in Greece, was badly prepared for a proper response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Observers as well as residents of the Moria camp were well aware of the fact that the basic rules of hygiene, such as frequent handwashing and social distancing, were very hard to follow under the current, squeezed conditions (Lauth Bacas 2020: 63). Nevertheless, teams of refugee volunteers (the ‘Moria White Helmet’ and the ‘Moria Corona Awareness Team’) tried to improve awareness of how to protect oneself (by handwritten posters in Farsi, Arabic, French and English); the UNHCR and other NGOs donated face masks, soap and disinfection liquids. In this crisis refugee lawyers and human-rights organizations, such as the Greek Council for Refugees, asked for urgent action to prevent a catastrophic spread of coronavirus in the refugee camp: they repeatedly demanded the evacuation of the camp and transfers of the most vulnerable refugees and asylum applicants to mainland Greece (Lauth Bacas 2020: 61). But faced with the practical obstacles of evacuating overcrowded refugee camps on border islands, on 19 March 2020 the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum announced another decision: a basic lockdown

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for all refugee-reception centres with heavy restrictions on any movements beyond the camp (Lauth Bacas 2020: 61). From that day on, only one person per family was allowed to leave the refugee camp once a week for shopping or other necessary activities. RIC Moria turned into a de facto closed facility, where overcrowding, miserable hygiene conditions and the high risk of spreading the pandemic continued to threaten the inhabitants. The already-restricted access for NGOs was reduced further by lockdown measures: entry to the Moria camp was prohibited to lawyers or volunteer organizations. This complete lockdown and restriction of movements beyond RIC Moria was extended by the Ministry of Migration and Asylum throughout the whole summer of 2020 (Lauth Bacas 2020: 66). In contrast to regulations being lifted for Greek inhabitants and tourists(!), the lockdown of the refugee camp was still in effect in late summer 2020 when the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported in RIC Moria. The Greek Council for Refugees immediately commented, ‘a disaster for the people who are stranded there. “Social distancing” and recommended hygiene practices to reduce risk are impossible …’.25 This outbreak of Covid-19 in the Moria reception centre by 2 September 2020 was a turning point. After half a year of continued Covid-19 lockdown and a strict curfew of the refugee camp, refugees and crisis migrants in Moria felt frightened, desperate and blocked – and had no way out in sight. The poor living conditions and prolonged lockdown of the Moria reception centre were at least in part responsible for developments that led to the fires of September 2020. That several tents inside the Moria camp eventually caught fire did not happen by chance. After six months of continuous and strict lockdown, when only one hundred people per day (of over ten thousand inhabitants) were allowed to leave the refugee camp for urgent matters, residents of RIC Moria felt depressed, desperate and blocked. Maybe some of them in great despair or anger set fire to garbage piles or other objects inside the camp? However, when assessing the stressed situation we have to keep in mind the fact that fires had already occurred on earlier occasions in RIC Moria owing to electricity shorting or accidents while cooking with camping gas. Heavy winds blowing on those days over the Aegean Sea led to the rapid spread of fires from tent to tent and finally to the complete destruction of the Moria camp by 8 and 9 September.26 The Greek government was very quick to accuse residents of the camp of arson one day later, on 10 September 2020.27 The issue of arson, the issue of ‘truth’ and local rumours about ‘several sources of the fire’ (indicating arson) turned into a controversial political debate on the

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island and among the Greek public over the following days.28 A police investigation started that led a week later, on 15 September 2020, to the arrest of six young Afghan asylum applicants, including two underage Afghans of Hazara identity, in connection with alleged arson at the Moria refugee camp.29 Six months later – on 9 March 2021, following a trial before the Juvenile Court of Mytilene – the two underage defendants were found guilty of arson and sentenced to five years in prison.30 The nongovernmental organization Legal Centre Lesbos, who represented the defendants during the court case, decided to appeal against this arson conviction (Lauth Bacas 2021). In other words, the case is not closed (and the trial of the four other defendants before the Court of Chios is open, too). Therefore, it is also in a strict legal sense incorrect to refer to the Moria fires of 8/9 September as arson.31 From a wider perspective, I want finally to return to the encompassing leitmotif of this volume: the issue of morality. In theorizing morality, it was Aristotle who introduced the concept of adequacy (the mean) as relevant for morally good conduct (Striker 1988: 192). This classical notion might offer a perspective for critically reflecting on political leadership and political action when delving into the period under consideration here. The EU–Turkey agreement of March 2016 had laid out an operative mechanism, which de facto formed a bottleneck in refugee reception from the very beginning. This mechanism was the geographical restriction set out for asylum applicants. Already by 2016, critical observers had hinted at serious problems caused by this restriction. Given the state of Greek public services at that time – when the Troika of lenders put the Greek government under constant pressure to reduce the number of public servants – the administrative capacities and the means available on a small border island were inadequate to speedily process large numbers of asylum applications or to prepare forced returns to Turkey as theoretically expected. The ‘geographical restriction’ in particular, applicable only on small border islands, led to a deplorable result – the ‘jamming’ and squeezing of refugees into the island-based RIC was obviously not adequate and therefore provided no solution at all. The prevailing mix of extremely poor living conditions in the Moria refugee camp – with thousands of flimsy tents and hand-built shacks, a strict and prolonged lockdown for the camp’s population during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the severe stress and despair of refugees residing there – were factors evidently responsible for developments that led to the fires of September 2020. For Aristotle, an influential analyst of the State and its moral conduct, not providing adequate means to prevent a human disaster would be understood as a failure of good political

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leadership. Inspired by his critical reasoning, systematic absences of political leadership and a systematic delay in improving conditions in Greek refugee-reception centres can be understood as the core of the problem. This leads us to a broader reading of the Moria case as a story of governance, leadership and failure: how top-level political leaders – after having met on ‘golden thrones’ – contracted and presented a ‘solution’ containing inadequate means, which in the end generated a new problem: the Moria catastrophe. This catastrophe was founded in the lasting absence of relevant action(s) by the Greek authorities, in cooperation with key EU agencies such as the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and the European Agency for the Management of External Borders (FRONTEX). Over the years, little to nothing had been done to bring an end to the overwhelming mix of overcrowding, limited water supply, filthy sanitary facilities, dirt, piles of garbage, missing medical care and missing education facilities for children. All the institutions involved in running RIC Moria had allowed and thus sustained, right under their noses, living conditions that international observers had characterized as not only appalling but inhumane. Finally, after years of clear mismanagement, in September 2020 the ‘time bomb’ exploded and a fire swept through and destroyed Europe’s largest refugee camp. Jutta Lauth Bacas holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Zurich with a special focus on transnational migration studies. She has held teaching positions at universities in Switzerland and Germany, and also worked as a senior researcher at the Academy of Athens, Greece, were she conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork on irregular migration and transit migration through Greece. In the context of critical migration studies, Jutta Lauth Bacas has published widely on irregular migration to Greece and on the agency and legal rights of undocumented migrants in Greece in edited volumes and journals – among others, in the Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Ethnologia Balkanica, Ethnologia Europaea and Focaal. Together with William Kavanagh, she edited the volume Border Encounters: Asymmetry and Proximity at Europe’s Frontiers (Berghahn 2013). Currently, she is Research Affiliate at the Mediterranean Institute of the University of Malta, critically monitoring the newly established ‘Hotspot’ reception centre for refugees and boat migrants on Lesbos, Greece.

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Notes  1. On in the situation in the Moria refugee camp before the fires, see also: Lauth Bacas (2020: 60f).  2. BBC, ‘Moria migrants: Fire destroys Greek camp leaving 13,000 without shelter’, 9 September 2020. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-europe-54082201  3. Data on irregular land and sea arrivals presented in this chapter are based on official reports of police apprehensions along the land and sea borders of Greece. Such data for estimating the size and flows of irregular migration are necessarily approximate since they do not cover clandestine and undetected arrivals of refugees and migrants in the country. Nevertheless, they can be understood as a useable source indicating fluctuations in refugee arrivals and changes in migration flows despite the difficulty of enumerating undetected and unknown migrant arrivals.  4. The turn of refugees and migrants to sea passages had been influenced by the erection of a 12.5 km barbed-wired fence in northern Greece some years before: by the end of 2012, after Greek authorities had decided to more strongly securitize the Evros region of northern Greece, a 4 m-tall barbed-wire fence was completed that made access to the country across the land border much more difficult. As a consequence of this intensified border policing, numbers of irregular land border crossings dropped and a shift in the pattern of clandestine arrivals occurred from land borders to the sea-border crossings (for details, see Lauth Bacas 2013b).  5. Looking at statistical data and the quantitative dimension of irregular migration processes across the Greek–Turkish border, the interested reader should keep in mind that in many such cases tragic biographies are hidden behind bald statistics. On the other hand, an analytical approach focusing on precise numbers is regarded as a counter argument to false generalizations. In some media reports on refugee arrivals, terms like ‘refugee waves’ or ‘streams of migrants’ are used, often connected with adjectives like ‘big’, ‘massive’ or ‘uncontrolled’, which are misleading for an analytical understanding of migratory processes in the Mediterranean.  6. The October 2015 meeting saw Chancellor Angela Merkel seated next to the Turkish President on ‘Erdogan’s Golden thrones’, two gilded chairs at his Ottoman-era mansion, drawing some international criticism. Political observers saw this presentation as political support for Erdoğan before national elections in Turkey. See Reuters, 19 October 2015, retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germanyidUSKCN0SD0QB20151019; also Bloomberg, 25 October 2015, retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/ erdogan-s-golden-throne-for-merkel-sends-message-before-election  7. European Council Press Release, 18 March 2016. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2016/03/18/ eu-turkey-statement/  8. Ibid.  9. Ibid. 10. With regard to Turkey as ‘a first country of asylum’ and ‘safe third country’, see Dimitriadi (2016); Iliadou (2019: 67). 11. See: Third Report on the Progress made in the implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement of 28.9.2016, p.13. pdf file: COM (2016) 634 final 12. UNHCR Operational Portal Greece, discussed in Lauth Bacas (2020: 54). 13. See Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 22 March 2021. Interview with Fabrice Leggeri (stating in German): ‘Ich bin mir sicher, dass nach Corona wieder mehr Flüchtlinge versuchen

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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werden, nach Europa zu kommen’. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://www. ksta.de/politik/rnd/frontex-chef--nach-corona-werden-mehr-fluechtlinge-versuchen--nach-europa-zu-kommen--38210726 Refugee Support Aegean, Asylum Statistics 2020. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://rsaegean.org/en/asylum-statistics-for-2020-a-need-for-regular-and-transparent-official-information/ See Lauth Bacas (2021) with regard to Greek return requests in 2021 and pending Turkish replies. Since the concluding of the agreement in 2016, the Turkish Coast Guard Command reports on a weekly basis about the seizure of inflatable dinghies or other small boats carrying irregular migrants. Turkish Coast Guard Command, Statistics 2016. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://en.sg.gov.tr/irregular-migration-statistics Ibid. Engaged researchers like Bosiou (2020) wrote of Aegean ‘prison islands’. ‘Managing the Refugee Crisis, EU-Turkey Statement’. 2016. ReliefWeb website. Retrieved 22 February from https://reliefweb.int/report/turkey/ managing-refugee-crisis-eu-turkey-statement This procedure is applied in all Greek RICs in line with the EU–Turkey Statement of 2016 (Kuster and Tsianos 2016). The names of the interlocutors reported in this chapter have been changed to protect their identities. The interlocutor spoke German rather fluently, translation to English by the author. Hospitality, a spontaneous gesture in the social field I had entered, can be understood as a way of dealing with a foreigner, transforming him/her from a hostile stranger to a guest (Pitt-Rivers 2012, Herzfeld 2012). Herzfeld (1992) has also suggested that ‘hospitality provides the poor, the dependent, and the politically disadvantaged with unique opportunities for symbolizing the reversal of their plight’ (Herzfeld 1992: 171). According to this assumption hospitality in socially conflictive and extraordinary settings can be understood as a ‘shifter’ and a practice that, if carried out from a politically ‘weaker’ position, can be seen as a form of resilience (Pozzi 2021). Greek Council for Refugees, Press Release on 2 September 2020. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://www.gcr.gr/en/news/press-releases-announcements?start=40 More reports are given, for example, by members of MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières); see ‘Five Powerful Posts About Life in Moria Camp Before the Fire’. 2020. MSF website. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://blogs.msf.org/bloggers/blogs-team/ five-powerful-posts-about-life-moria-camp-fire ‘Griechische Regierung: Migranten haben Feuer in Moria gelegt’. 2020. Süddeutsche Zeitung website. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://www.sueddeutsche.de/ politik/moria-feuer-brandstiftung-1.5027699 ‘Wer hat Moria angezündet?’ 2020. Zeit Online website. Retrieved 22 February from https:// www.zeit.de/2020/39/moria-brand-fluechtlingslager-brandstiftung-griechenland/ komplettansicht ‘Five Arrested in Suspected Arson at Moria Camp’. 2020. Greek Reporter website. Retrieved 22 February from https://greekreporter.com/2020/09/15/ five-arrested-in-suspected-arson-at-moria-camp/ ‘Justice for the Moria 6’. 2021. Legal Centre Lesvos website. Retrieved 22 February from http://legalcentrelesvos.org/2021/03/09/justice-for-the-moria-6/ Stated on 30 June 2020. Last-instance decisions might overrule this author’s statement at a later point.

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References Amnesty International. 2016. ‘No Safe Refuge. Asylum Seekers and Refugees Denied Effective Protection in Turkey’. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur44/3825/2016/en/. Bauböck, Rainer. 2018. ‘Refugee Protection and Burden-Sharing in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies 56(1): 141–56. Ben-Yehoyada, Naor, Heath Cabot and Paul Silverstein. 2020. ‘Introduction: Remapping Mediterranean Anthropology’, History and Anthropology 31(1): 1–21. Bousiou, Alexandra. 2020. ‘From Humanitarian Crisis Management to Prison Island: Implementing the European Asylum Regime at the Border Island of Lesvos 2015-2017’, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 22(3): 431–47. Çağlar, Ayşe and Nina Glick Schiller. 2021. ‘Relational Multiscalar Analysis: A Comparative Approach to Migrants within City-Making Processes’, Geographical Review 111(2): 206–32. Dimitriadi, Angeliki. 2016. ‘The Impact of the EU-Turkey Statement on Protection and Reception: The Case of Greece’, Working Paper 15. Essen: Stiftung Mercator. Elitok, Seçil Paçacı. 2019. Three Years on: An Evaluation of the EU-Turkey refugee deal. Istanbul: MiReKoc (Migration Research Center at Koç University). European Stability Initiative. 2019. ‘Core Facts: The EU-Turkey Statement Three Years On’. Report of 15 April 2019. Berlin: European Stability Initiative. Glick Schiller, Nina. 2015. ‘Explanatory Frameworks in Transnational Migration Studies: The Missing Multi-Scalar Global Perspective’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 38(13): 2275–82. Hellenic Police. 2017. Statistical Data on Illegal Migration 2017. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from http://www.astynomia.gr/images/stories//2017/ statistics17/allodapwn/12_statistics_all_2017_sull_yphkoothta.png. Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.   2012. ‘Afterword: Reciprocating the Hospitality of Those Pages’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(1): 201–17. Hess, Sabine and Bernd Kasparek. 2017.‘Under Control? Or Border (as) Conflict: Reflections on the European Border Regime’, Social Inclusion 5(3): 58–68. Hess, Sabine, Bernd Kasparek, Stefanie Kron, Mathias Rodatz, Maria Schwertl and Simon Sontowski (eds). 2017. Der lange Sommer der Migration. Grenzregime III. Berlin: Assoziation A. Human Rights Watch. 2016a. ‘EU/Turkey: Mass, Fast-Track Returns Threaten Rights’. Retrieved 21 February 2022 from https://www.hrw.org/ news/2016/03/08/eu/turkey-mass-fast-track-returns-threaten-rights.   2016b. ‘Why the EU-Turkey Migration Deal is No Blueprint’. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/14/qa-why-euturkey-migration-deal-no-blueprint on 12/11/21. Iliadou, Evgenia. 2019. ‘Safe Havens and Prison Islands: The Politics of Protection and Deterrence of Border Crossers on Lesvos Island’, Graduate Journal of Social Science 15(1): 62–88.

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Ilias, Aggelos, Nadina Leivaditi, Evangelia Papatzani and Electra Petracou. 2019. ‘Border Management and Migration Controls in Greece’. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://www.respondmigration.com/. King, Russell and Daniela DeBono. 2013. ‘Irregular Migration and the Southern European Model of Migration’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 22(1): 1–31. Knaus, Gerald. 2016. ‘Keeping the Aegean Agreement Afloat’, Turkish Policy Quarterly Fall 2016: 43–50. Kuster, Brigitta and Vassilis Tsianos. 2016. Hotspot Lesbos: ‘Aus den Augen, aus dem Sinn‘ Flüchtlinge und Migranten an den Rändern Europas. Berlin: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Lauth Bacas, Jutta. 2008. ‘Encounters at the Pagani Detention Center on Lesbos’, in Jörn-Erik Gutheil (ed), When Escape Crashes against Brick Walls. Düsseldorf: Evangelische Kirche im Rheinland, pp. 51–53.   2010. ‘No Safe Haven: The Reception of Irregular Boat Migrants in Greece’, in Klaus Roth and Jutta Lauth Bacas (eds), Migration in, from and to South Eastern Europe: Ways and Means of Migrating. Berlin: LIT, pp. 147–69.   2013a. ‘Managing Proximity and Asymmetry in Border Encounters: The Reception of Undocumented Migrants on a Greek Border Island’, in Jutta Lauth Bacas and William Kavanagh (eds), Border Encounters – Asymmetry and Proximity at Europe’s Frontiers. New York: Berghahn, pp. 256–80.   2013b. ‘Perceiving Fences and Experiencing Borders in Greece: A Discourse on Changes at European Borders’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 22(2): 317–34.   2014. ‘Grey Zones of Illegality: Inhuman Conditions in Receiving Irregular Migrants in Greece’, in Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois and Nils Zurawski (eds), The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-Terrorism and Border Control. London: Pluto Press, pp. 158–82.   2020. ‘Griechenland und der Hotspot Lesbos im Corona-März 2020’, Südosteuropa-Mitteilungen 01–02: 51–66.   2021. ‘Nägel mit Köpfen? EU-Politik auf Lesbos nach dem Brand von Moria’, Im Dialog, Beiträge aus der Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart 4: 65–85. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://imdialog.akademie-rs.de/ojs/ index.php/idadrs/article/view/735. Painter, Joe, Anna Papoutsi, Evie Papada and Antonis Vradis. 2016. ‘Flags Flying up a Trial Mast: Reflections on the Hotspot Mechanism in Mytilene’, Society and Space, Online Forum: Governing Mobility Through The European Union’s ‘Hotspot’ Centres. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://www. societyandspace.org/articles/flags-flying-up-a-trial-mast-reflections-on-thehotspot-mechanism-in-mytilene. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 2012. ‘The Law of Hospitality’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 501–17. [Reprint of Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 1977. The Fate of Shechem or The Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 94–112.] Pozzi, Giacomo. 2021. ‘Hosting Futures: Dispossession and Hospitality in Contemporary Portugal’, EtnoAntropologia 9(1): 21–40.

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Stavropoulou, Maria. 2015.  ‘Flüchtlinge: Wir sahen im Februar, was kommt’. Retrieved 31 March 2022 from  https://www.diepresse.com/4884089/ fluechtlinge-bdquowir-sahen-im-februar-was-kommtldquo. Striker, Gisela. 1988, ‘Greek Ethics and Moral Theory’. The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Stanford University, 14 and 19 May 1987. Retrieved 22 February 2022 from https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/ato-z/s/Striker88.pdf. Ziegler, Jean. 2020. Lesbos, la honte de l'Europe. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Chapter 5

Relevance, Ethics and the ‘Good’ in Anthropology Moving beyond the Anthropology of Crisis to the Ethical Crises in Anthropology Jean-Paul Baldacchino

I

n 2015 the executive committee of the European Association of Anthropology issued a statement called ‘Why anthropology matters?’ This statement came out of a conference that focused on the ways in which ‘cultural and social anthropology can make a difference in Europe today … in the shadow of the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe’ (EASA 2015). The statement concluded that while anthropology ‘does not itself profess to solve the problems facing humanity, it gives its practitioners skills and knowledge that enable them to tackle complex questions in very competent and relevant ways’ (EASA 2015). The ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe can be placed alongside a number of other ‘crises’ within the region. Over the last decade or so the concept of ‘crisis’ has begun to circulate with increasing social and academic currency. The ‘financial crisis’ of 2008 presented an ‘opportunity’ for the revitalization of an economic anthropology once ‘the mask of neo-liberal ideology ha[d] been ripped off from the politics of world economy’ (Hart and Ortiz 2008: 3; cf. Carrier 2012). When the financial crisis hit Greece in the late 2000s this led to its own brand of ‘crisis scholarship’. Such crises become part of a global political imagery within the neoliberal economic world (Knight 2013: 156). More recently one can look at the ‘health crisis’ that has gripped Europe and the world in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic. The anthropology of the Covid-19 pandemic is still being written (see Higgins, Martin and Vesperi 2020); however, it has already led to a plethora of grant proposals, special issues and conference volumes. For some this ‘crisis’ presents an opportunity for anthropology to show its relevance to the other sciences and to society more broadly,

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which is ‘measured by the efforts we collectively undertake to reach out, much more widely and much more creatively’ (Salazar 2020: 346). Salazar stresses the need to go beyond the ‘traditional inward-looking’ (2020: 346) academic publications and conferences. There seems to be a certain parallel between the emergence of a ‘crisis’ at a given point in time and the drive for anthropologists to show why anthropology matters and the need to demonstrate its relevance. There is indeed an interesting point of convergence between the crisis experienced within anthropology and the crises that we rush to study. In a very direct way the economic crisis that began in 2008 made universities face budget cuts and students were encouraged to consider education in terms of jobs, which placed disciplines like anthropology under threat (Carrier 2012: 116). The financial crisis has been used as ‘an instrument for the privatization of higher education’ (Heatherington and Zerilli 2016: 78). It has at the same time been seen by others as an opportunity for anthropology to show its importance while succumbing to ‘the interests and temporalities of the neoliberal university’s politics of relevance’ (Cabot 2019: 267). Within the context of the anthropology of the ‘refugee crisis’ Heath Cabot is highly critical of the ‘crisis chasing’ that characterizes the study of European border crossers. Crisis chasing as she defines it is ‘the propensity to take crisis as a driver of scholarship; assuming that “refugee experiences” need to be studied; and, finally, heeding the call to “do good” through scholarship in ways that … reinforce particular notions of public interest, usefulness, and social relevance’ (Cabot 2019: 262). Scholars rushed to the European ‘hotspots’ chasing scholarships and research funds, driven by the exigencies of a neoliberal academia wherein jobs are increasingly tied to a research agenda driven by notions of ‘relevance’. As anthropologists, however, we must also be wary of our own entanglements with the very power structures that reproduce these crises. The definition of a ‘crisis’ simultaneously constructs the experiences in question as a state of exception (Agamben 2005). The use of the term ‘crisis’ therefore invokes a technology of power that reconfigures the event in terms other than the systemic ‘failure and distortion of advanced capitalism’ (Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos 2018: 106) wherein the experiences of dispossession and displacement are not states of exception but the ‘anticipated rhythm of future politics’ (Ramsay 2020: 407). Anthropology has a long (and tortuous) history of reflexive interrogation of its own practices. In 1961 Claude Lévi-Strauss was already declaring anthropology itself to be in a state of crisis. The ‘savage’ societies that had been the traditional object of anthropological study were rapidly disappearing as these societies came into increasing contact with

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the West – and its economy and pathologies. Secondly, those societies that did survive and thrive were ‘categorically hostile to anthropology for psychological and ethical reasons’ (Lévi-Strauss 2008: 44). A reflexive understanding of our own practices became an increasingly pressing task as we grew aware that anthropology – knowingly and unknowingly – accompanied colonial and imperialistic ambitions (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 126). The anthropologist in the field, like many other Europeans in the colonial setting, occupied a position of superiority in relation to the colonial/anthropological subject. In many ways anthropology has been in ‘crisis’ ever since. No course in the history of anthropology is complete nowadays without a discussion of the colonial entanglements of the discipline. As Lewis notes, writing in the 1970s, the relationship of inequality between Westerner and non-Western emerged out of the very conditions that ‘created a need for the anthropologist and assured that the indigenous people would be accessible to him for study’ (Lewis 1973: 582). The following sections shall be devoted to a discussion of different ‘crises’ that have faced anthropology since then. This ‘history’ is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis but rather it is presented as a brief sequence of moments wherein the discipline was seen to be undergoing a ‘crisis’ bringing the question of the ethics of anthropology to the foreground. In each of these moments of crisis we encounter a reevaluation of the relationship with the people we study and the various configurations of knowledge/power from which such a relationship is born. These crisis, therefore, were at once ethical and epistemological – and it is indeed hard to disentangle one from the other when discussing anthropology as a praxis. Looking at the challenges to anthropology in light of these moments can provide the background to an appeal to move our discussion over ethics in anthropology beyond the politics of relevance. The current debates over ‘crisis chasing’ could benefit from this longer-term analysis of the ‘crisis’ of anthropology itself, and not just because the historical causes of crises within and outside the discipline are intertwined (Carrier 2012). In the final analysis I argue that the developing interest in the anthropology of ethics can provide us with a new way to approach the ethics of anthropology.

Anthropology’s Entanglements with Empire: The 1960s–1970s The days of naïve anthropology are over. It is no longer adequate to collect information about little known and powerless people; one needs to know also the uses to which that knowledge can be put. Behind an appeal for pure

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research, a research grant, a consultant’s fee, an appeal to personal vanity or to patriotism, is a government that may well use the knowledge gained to damage the subjects among whom it was gathered. Perhaps this is the grimmest lesson of all the events of the past years: many a naïve anthropologist has become, wittingly or unwittingly, an informer. (Wolf and Jorgensen 1970: 34)

In 1967, just six years after Lévi-Strauss proclaimed the state of crisis in anthropology, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) developed its ‘Statement on Problems of Anthropological Research and Ethics’ framed in the context of US involvement in the Vietnam War. The association expressed concern that ‘some anthropologists have used their professional standing and the names of their academic institutions as cloaks for the collection of intelligence information and for intelligence operations’ (AAA 1967). The involvement of anthropologists in Project Camelot had shocked and divided the anthropological community (Weston and Djohari 2020: 66–90). The multi-million-dollar Project Camelot was designed to assess the potential for internal war within various nations of interest in the Cold War period (Horowitz 1974). The AAA ethics committee, set up subsequently, was particularly tasked with assessing the alleged involvement of anthropologists in research in the aid of counter-insurgency. In 1970 documents were leaked revealing the involvement of anthropologists in US State Department-funded research providing expert advice to aid the government’s counter-insurgency agenda in Thailand. This revelation caused a furore globally. In Australia this prompted the ‘ethical turn’ in Australian anthropology (Robinson 2004). Wolf and Jorgensen as Chair and member of the AAA ethics committee had written to the named anthropologists requesting clarification and expressing their concern over their involvement in these projects. As a result, however, Wolf and Jorgensen were officially reprimanded by the AAA executive presided over by Margaret Mead, who argued that they had exceeded their brief. This led to their resignation and their ‘whistleblower’ article in the New York Review of Books cited at the opening of this section. By the late 1960s voices from within the discipline were already declaring that anthropology was in a ‘state of crisis’ in which ‘[d] isillusionment with the discipline from outside is paralleled by growing criticism from within’ (Lewis 1973: 581). Much of this criticism revolved around the accountability of anthropologists for the political realities of their work. Eric Wolf’s own brand of ‘critical anthropology’ was developed as a direct response to these crises. Heyman characterizes it as an outlook built from an ‘ethical-political humanism’ that ‘does not give us certainties of the kind that excuse us from genuine moral effort but demands of us the combination of

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moral and intellectual labour in the world’ (Heyman 2005: 22). For Wolf anthropology was both a way of viewing the world and also a vision for humankind. He envisioned an anthropology that required an intellectual as well as an ethical commitment (Heyman 2005: 14). In some respects Wolf’s response to the professional crisis of anthropology in the late 1960s and early 1970s prefigured the sorts of debates that were to emerge in the 1990s. In the 1980s, however, a different sort of ‘crisis’ was to face anthropology – and many other disciplines – which was epistemological but, as we shall see, also contained profound moral implications.

Questioning the Object of Anthropology: From Truth to Text, 1980s–1990s we have paid attention to the media of expression and the embedded problematics of value, conceived as questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and interests which ethnographers confront both in their engaged field research and in their experimenting with innovative ways to write about it. (Marcus and Fisher 1986: 167)

With the dwindling in Cold War hostilities and the liberalization of the Soviet economy the main ethical challenge to anthropology came in the form of an attack on the epistemology of fieldwork (Marcus and Fisher 1986: 34). In the 1980s anthropologists, and scholars from other fields, began a process of critical interrogation. Gone was the assurance in the authority of the ethnographer in representing the ‘other’. Influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault and Edward Said among others we find a call to look beyond epistemology, with ‘truth’ itself becoming increasingly recognized as an epiphenomenon of the conditions of its production (Rabinow 1986: 240). ‘Humanism’ itself came under attack. It was seen to be hopelessly implicated in Enlightenment epistemes built out of a particular order of power/knowledge. Using Marx and Durkheim as exemplars Rabinow argues that in their work ‘the true, the good and the beautiful remained isomorphic’ (Rabinow 1988: 357). Science was seen to be the ‘universally adequate vehicle for representing reality’ (Rabinow 1988: 357). The search for truth and what it itself revealed were considered to be good in and of themselves. In response to the crisis in anthropology led by, among others, the Berkeley anthropologists (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986), various anthropologists focused on ethnography as a text. In this ‘experimental moment’ dialogic modes of textual representation were considered to be more ‘true’ to the conditions of the ethnographic encounter and the production of its knowledge than conventional ethnographic

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accounts. The focus shifted to finding ways to attribute moral value to the voices we encounter in the field, displacing the authoritative and authorial centrality of the anthropologist. A ‘good’ ethnography in this sense sought to do justice to the role of our informants in the production of our texts, their own voices and the dialogic encounter that produced them. Questions about the ‘art of writing’ (Turner 1993: 47) therefore were not merely stylistic but had come to have profound ethical implications. For some this led to a hopeless emptying of all value and opened the path to nihilism. The anthropological field was caught between those accused of a cultural (and, indeed, moral) relativism and those who viewed relativism as a clear and present danger revitalizing propositions of a ‘universal human nature’. In his distinguished lecture published in American Anthropologist Geertz made reference to the Red Menace and the persecution by McCarthy of alleged communists in order to describe the attack on relativists. While Geertz points out that his analogy is ‘logical and not substantive’ the reference is more than casually evocative (Geertz 1984: 263). Some of the detractors came from within the ‘postmodernist’ camp itself. In his critique of Geertz and his ‘textualist nephews’ Rabinow observes that such an anthropology leaves us with ethnographies with ‘no-thing to teach’, with aesthetics taking over the legitimating function of truth: ‘The focus on no-thing is the great shortcoming, disillusionment, of Geertzian anthropology. Although we learn from this anthropology how different things can be, it is silent about who we are’ (Rabinow 1988: 359). As a remedy Rabinow proposes an anthropology built from the insights of Foucault – a figure who, he notes, is absent from the pages of the seminal Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1986). As can be seen from the preceding paragraphs it is hard to argue that this ‘crisis’ instigated by postmodernism in the 1980s led to a unified field even from within anthropology. Postmodernism can be divided into the ‘post-structuralist’ and ‘humanist’ varieties. It has in fact been argued that in anthropology postmodernism retained a certain humanist orientation in such a way that giving attention to the marginal and the excluded was not incompatible with the critique of metanarratives (Smart 2011: 332).

The Return of the Political: The 1990s and the Activist Anthropologist Nowadays, one can have a moral career in anthropology; having a moral career in anthropology is being known for what one has denounced. This is

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not an argument that anthropologists should have no politics; it is an argument that they should keep their politics separate from the way they do their science. (D’Andrade 1995: 400)

The 1990s marked yet another moment of crisis in anthropology – this time over the ends of anthropology. In such an approach anthropology is seen to have an instrumental function with certain morally valued goods lying at the top of a value hierarchy. The debate between Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995) and her detractors (D’Andrade 1995) gave birth to a ‘rhetorical paradigm’ based on a radical opposition between those advocating a ‘moral engagement’ and a discussion of the ethical aspects of our studies against detractors who are suspicious of the moralism that ensues, which for them lies beyond the scope of anthropological enquiry (Fassin 2008: 333). Scheper-Hughes famously advocated for a ‘militantanthropology’ understood in terms of ‘an active politically committed and morally engaged anthropology’ (Scheper-Hughes 1995: 410). For her there is no position of neutrality in our research. The ‘cultural relativism’ that characterized anthropology, she argued, is synonymous with a ‘moral relativism’ that had hitherto exempted anthropologists from political engagement in the fields they studied. The concept of the investigador militante (activist researcher) was nothing new within a Latin American context, where the notion of a disinterested analysis appears a luxury (Schaumberg 2010: 211). Indeed in many ways the primacy of the moral task of anthropologists was clear in Wolf’s humanism in the first moment of crisis described above. Writing more than thirty years before, Wolf was clear: ‘Anthropologists must be willing to testify on behalf of the oppressed people of the world’ (Wolf and Jorgensen 1970: 35). For others, however, the political/moral commitment of anthropologists was deemed to be at best irrelevant and at worst downright incompatible with the commitment to scientific truth. In this respect the approach was not too dissimilar to the Enlightenment model earlier critiqued by the post-structuralists inasmuch as the scientific model was premised on ‘the separation of the ethics of the scientist from the objective conditions of knowledge’ (Rabinow 1988: 358). D’Andrade poses the question as a choice of ‘whether one’s first allegiance is to morality or to truth’ (D’Andrade 1995: 405). For D’Andrade the answer is obvious: whatever one wants in terms of political change should always be secondary to understanding ‘how things work’ (1995: 408). There is ultimately a tension here between the wish to ‘do good’ and doing ‘good ethnography’. Truth in this sense was proposed as a good in and of itself, which stands opposed to its instrumentalization for a moral good.

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To a certain degree the programmatic statements by Scheper-Hughes were echoing a wider public sentiment. Kevin Carter’s famous 1993 Pulitzer-winning photograph of the ‘Struggling Girl’, depicting a starving Sudanese girl being tailed by a vulture, provoked a public outcry as readers of the New York Times widely condemned Carter, asking if he had stopped to help this child (Guerts 2015: 2). For many documenting or even simply understanding the suffering of others was no longer tenable. The ethical crisis in anthropology now coalesced over the alleged tension between moral/activist and scientific/objective approaches (Robinson 2004: 379). Morality in this sense is juxtaposed with science in the way that politics is juxtaposed with truth. For those advocating for an ‘objectivist’ approach scientific methods can be utilized and deployed in the service of moral goals; however, scientific truth stands on its own grounds and must not be confused with it. Presented in this manner the challenge can be phrased in terms of a conflict between our commitment to humanist ethics and that to a scientific epistemology. While postmodernism and postcolonialism placed in doubt our capacity to speak ‘truth’ disconnected from the power relations that produce it, they had equally called into question the humanist premises for our moral interventions.

The Current State of Anthropology: From the Rise of Procedural Ethics to the Anthropology of Moralities As most anthropologists can readily note, ethics in anthropology have largely become a mundane matter. The question of the ethical scope of our enquiry has been subsumed by the procedural ethics of evaluation committees that exercise oversight of our research. Ethics has becoming somewhat divorced from discussions on debates over the ‘good’ of our own work. When ethics becomes simply relegated to university research ethics committees we run the risk of confusing genuine ethical debate with a sort of procedural ethics wherein compliance with ‘doctrines’ takes the place of deep ethical debate (Bell 2014; Wynn and Israel 2018). In 2013 the European Commission sponsored a report drafted by a panel of experts. The report aimed to develop ‘guidance and [raise] awareness’ on research ethics in anthropology. In the 73-page document intended primarily for an audience of research ethics committees we only find a half-page discussion of ‘Ethical Principles’. These principles are ‘doing good (beneficence), avoiding doing harm (non-maleficence), and protecting the autonomy, well-being, safety and dignity of all research participants’ (Iphofen 2013: 11). The EASA (2015) statement referred to

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earlier, meanwhile, points out that while it is committed to ‘cultural relativism’ this does not equate to a ‘moral relativism’, noting that ‘few would condone violence or inequality, although it may well be perpetrated in the name of “culture”’. On the other hand the appeal to a morally driven anthropology underpinned by the ‘legal universalisation’ (Douzinas 2001: 184) of human rights has far from receded to the pages of histories of the discipline. The impact of the debates initiated by Scheper-Hughes seems to have affected the highest circles of academic anthropology. At its annual business meeting in 2015 the American Anthropological Association overwhelmingly voted in favour of presenting a proposal to boycott Israeli academic institutions in protest over the violation of Palestinian rights. Appealing to human rights the proponents of the motion sought to emphasize the role of anthropology as a discipline that aims to work for social justice. This was certainly one of the landmark moments in the history of the ethics of anthropology. When placed on an online ballot for the entire membership, however, the motion itself was defeated by a narrow margin (50.4 per cent against to 49.6 per cent in favour from a total of 4,807 votes cast) (Redden 2016). For its detractors the sort of militant anthropology presented through this boycott proposal led to a dangerous blurring of ‘the distinction between anthropology, social work, development studies, and political activism’ (Gold 2018: 94). The closeness of the result as well as the very fact that the resolution was put to the vote in the first place are indicative of a change in the ethical currents of anthropology. By contrast one can compare this with the position and role that the executive committee had taken in the postwar period, as discussed in the first section. Writing more than thirty years ago Hakken, I believe, captured a situation that is still with us today: [O]ur discipline’s specific history has required a recasting of our ethical thought, but inappropriate notions of what ethics are have gotten in the way. As a result, we are functioning more or less without sufficient ethical coherence, caught between an ethics of engagement inadequately anchored in the discipline on the one hand, and the search for a sanitized ‘techno-ethic’ profoundly inappropriate to humanistic endeavour on the other. (Hakken 1991: 81)

While the debate over the ethics of anthropology has largely stagnated, over the last few years a growing number of scholars have turned to addressing ethics as an object of ethnographic enquiry. Beginning with Laidlaw’s (2002) seminal essay the argument has been made that insufficient attention has been paid to the ethics of social life. Didier Fassin similarly calls for a ‘moral anthropology’ that studies morality itself – ‘in

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other words which explores how societies ideologically and emotionally found their cultural distinction between good and evil, and how social agents concretely work out their separation in everyday life’ (Fassin 2008: 334). There are some important differences in the approaches being taken in this ‘ethical turn’. For some, ethics must be seen to emerge from the practice of everyday life whereas for others some overlying, principled notion of the ‘good’ cannot be dispensed with in understanding the ethical lives of our informants (see discussion in Venkatesan 2015). There is an interesting connection between the debates around ethics in anthropology and the development of an anthropology of morality. Proponents of the latter have expressed their dissatisfaction with the naïve moralism that has characterized anthropology since the 1990s (Robbins 2013; Fassin 2008), and to some extent see this anthropology of morality as the remedy for it. Fassin juxtaposes a critical discourse with the moral positionalism of the ‘barefoot anthropology’ proposed by the likes of Scheper-Hughes. Instead of the a priori notion of good and evil in this militant anthropology Fassin is interested in ‘where and why social agents locate the good and the bad’ (Fassin 2008: 339). Joel Robbins (2013) develops a similar argument. He argues that while the 1980s marked the end of certainty of the otherness of ‘the other’ this left a vacuum in anthropology. The place of the other in anthropology was taken by the ‘suffering subject’ (Robbins 2013: 448). This focus on what he terms the ‘suffering slot’ has allowed anthropologists to recuperate a new space of relevance through the universalization of trauma as characteristic of a ‘humanity without borders’ (Robbins 2013: 454). One could argue that in many respects the ‘anthropology of crisis’ with which we opened this discussion is simply another iteration of this ‘suffering slot’ anthropology. This ‘suffering slot’ represents an ethnography that is ‘secure in its knowledge of good and evil and works towards achieving progress in the direction of its already widely accepted models of the good’ (Robbins 2013: 456). Such models of the good as critiqued by Robbins and Fassin, I argue, are ultimately driven by the human-rights model that formalizes the humanism from which it springs. The humanism of rights, however, is ultimately based on a definition of the ‘essence of humanity’ marked by a certain desire to go back to classical sources even though classical humanism was itself a discourse of exclusion (exclusion of slaves, barbarians and women) (Douzinas 2001: 189). As Douzinas writes, ‘What history has taught us is that there is nothing sacred about any definition of humanity and nothing eternal about its scope’ (2001: 189). In anthropology this humanism is manifest in a certain unquestioning appeal to human rights. To cite but one example Schaumberg argues for an ‘engaged anthropology’ because ‘[c]onsistent political engagement beyond our research locality

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and topic will provide insights that can support the urgent task of defending human rights’ (Schaumberg 2010: 214). The anthropologist emerges in such visions as the ‘defender of human rights’, which ultimately reinforces certain forms of essentialism. The universality of human rights, however, is also a ‘normative claim’, which ultimately refers to a particular political and institutional structure in charge of enforcing it. Given the complexity of ‘human rights’ and its critique, Gold warns that anthropology ‘should not fall into the trap of resorting to human rights in order to sustain its moral-cum-political projects’ (Gold 2018: 96). We must be careful, however, not to overemphasize the ‘moral commitment’ of the sort of anthropology being critiqued by Fassin and Robbins. One must recognize that this ‘suffering slot’ anthropology is itself the result of particular changes in our political economy – not least the political–economic processes affecting our universities. As Cabot argues the agenda for such an anthropology is often set by the funding bodies on which academic tenure has come to increasingly depend. Indeed ‘the decision to pursue these topics is as much a matter of livelihood as morality, even if framed in moral terms’ (Bell 2018: 54). Robbins, in a similar move to Fassin’s, proposes an ‘anthropology of the good’ (my emphasis) as an antidote to this suffering-slot anthropology. Such an anthropology would be built out of the studies of ‘value, morality, imagination, well-being, empathy, care, the gift, hope, time and change’ (Robbins 2013: 457). In both Fassin’s and Robbin’s model a programmatic focus on the subject of the morality of our informants is built out of, and takes the place of, a discussion of ethics in anthropology. For their detractors, however, anthropologists of morality have simply replaced one moral paradigm with another in anthropology. Others simply see this moral anthropology as the latest incarnation of the postmodern turn in the discipline (Bell 2018: 52). Kapferer and Gold go so far as to state that the research agenda of the moral anthropologists themselves is in fact bound to ‘the terms of Western liberal and moral philosophy very much implicated in currently renewed efforts for the imperializing hegemony of Western value’ (Kapferer and Gold 2018: 11). Gold traces a direct connection between the call for an activist and politically engaged anthropology and the rise of moral anthropology as promoted by Fassin and the others. She believes that there is an underlying thread that brings together the ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology in the 1990s and the emergence of the anthropology of moralities (Gold 2018: 89). It is, however, difficult to see the direct connection here between the two sorts of anthropology. Robbins himself, for example, was highly critical of the activist anthropology of the 1990s (what he termed ‘suffering slot’ anthropology), which was driven by human-rights discourses.

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Nonetheless, it is true that in spite of their appeal to a renewal of the ethical debate in anthropology there remains a remarkable disconnection between the discussions of the anthropology of ethics and those over the ethics of anthropology (Caduff 2011: 466). In this respect, at least so far, the anthropology of morality remains a missed opportunity. The authors have failed to show how a study of the ethics of our subjects can actually address the issue of the ethics-of-anthropological enquiry. Simply stating that anthropologists could focus on ‘the different ways people live for the good, and finding ways to let their efforts inform our own’ (Robbins 2013: 459) does not seem to advance our argument over the ethics of anthropology. In some respects one could argue that Fassin’s and Robbins’ visions for ethics in anthropology have more in common with D’Andrade’s position. For Fassin – and, I would argue, for D’Andrade – ultimately ‘intelligibility’ becomes the overriding goal of ethnographic practice. Fassin’s model of critical analysis seeks to develop our understanding of the other by ‘considering the sense that words and acts have for social agents but also by inscribing them in their broader historical and political context’ (Fassin 2008: 339). This conclusion does not seem to differ from that reached by the EASA statement cited at the opening of this paper wherein the authors note that ‘a professional, or scientific, perspective represented in anthropology emphasizes the need to understand what humans do and how they interpret their own actions and world-views’ (EASA 2015, my emphasis). It seems that we have not moved far, in that we are still dealing with a version of a ‘good’, ‘scientific’ anthropology seeking to understand the worlds we encounter.

Conclusion Without claiming to provide a comprehensive history of ethical debates in anthropology this chapter has sought to present three different ‘moments of crisis’ in the discipline of anthropology. I have sought to locate these moments within the broader geopolitical contexts in which they arose. These crises, I argue, are also fundamentally about the ethical scope of anthropology as such. While presented as ‘moments’ the different positions developed out of these ethical debates remain relevant today. In this conclusion I propose that we can separate three different perspectives on the ethics of anthropology linked to the particular ‘domain’ that anthropology is seen to inhabit. These are the political, literary and the scientific models. With each of these domains comes a corresponding technique of analysis. In the political model anthropological research is conducted as a form of advocacy or even simply ‘witnessing’ (Das 2007: 221). This can

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be contrasted with the scientific model wherein the proper technique is based on analysis and observation. The literary model on the other hand looks towards a form of hermeneutics as its proper mode of analysis. There is of course a degree of analytical simplification in these models as presented, and each individual anthropologist might be held to ‘inhabit’ overlapping domains (for example, the humanist varieties of postmodern anthropology). Onto each of these models for the discipline we can also map a different view of ethics. I am taking ethics here to simply mean the relationships we are to have with ‘the other’, while purposely retaining the ambiguities of all that term can imply. In the specific case of anthropology the people we study, and build our careers from, constitute an important other in this sense. As such, in the context of research practice, ethics in this sense is (partly) the result of our ordinary interactions with others (Das 2015; Lambek 2010). To each of the models described above we can attribute a different kind of relationship to the other. When anthropology is conceived as a sort of politics the anthropologist is required to actively engage with the lives of his or her informants. This can be opposed to a scientific model, in which understanding takes the place of engagement as the proper relationship to develop with our ‘subjects’. In the literary model on the other hand subjects become interlocutors and the relationship is fundamentally conceived to be dialogic, to the point at which informants become coauthors in our studies (for a recent example see Marcus and Mascarenhas [2005], written as a collaboration between the Marquis of Fronteira and Aloma in Portugal, Fernando Mascarenhas, and the anthropologist George E. Marcus). While I do agree that ethics is the result of our praxis it would be naïve to divorce such practice from the axiology that drives it, even though the latter is not necessarily overtly discussed. As Robbins notes, ‘human beings tend to think some things are good and that this plays a crucial role in shaping their actions’ (Venkatesan 2015: 441). Anthropologists are no exception. Even a scientific model, while shying away from engaging with notions of ‘the good’, actually constructs its own axiology. We could consider ‘truth’ to be the orienting value of anthropology conceived of as scientific practice. In the case of the political model the notion of the good is foregrounded (albeit often unquestioned). This tends to be derived from humanism sustained by an appeal to human rights. In the literary approach the axiological values are more difficult to define – especially since there are different ‘camps’ within this approach. We may perhaps consider the idea of critique in and of itself to constitute a good for which anthropology in this mould strives – what, following Foucault, Caduff describes as ‘an ethics of discomfort’ wherein critical analysis is ‘itself a form of ethical practice’ (Caduff 2011: 477).

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Figure 5.1. Diagrammatic representation of the competing frameworks of the ethical scope of anthropology organized according to Domain/Technique, Orienting Value, Relation to the Other and the respective Critiques to them. © Jean-Paul Baldacchino.

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In a discipline characterized by reflexive analysis each of these approaches has in turn been subject to vigorous debate and different critiques, as noted in the preceding paragraphs. The political approach has been accused of moral positionalism while the scientific approach has been critiqued for its irrelevance. The literary approach has, in turn, been accused of advancing a form of (moral?) relativism. I have summarized these positions in diagrammatic manner (see Figure 5.1). The moral question of anthropology is fundamental and, as the notion of crisis begins to take on even more rhetorical force within and without the discipline, we need to be able to foreground the ethics of our practice. In spite of her misgivings over ‘crisis anthropology’ and concomitant claims of ‘doing good’ in anthropology Cabot does come to the conclusion that anthropologists ‘should also, of course, seek to do some good in the world’ – indeed she believes that ‘in a political climate of rising xenophobia, securitization, and racialized violence, anthropologists may have even more profound responsibilities’ (Cabot 2019: 271). The compelling question we need to address at this point centres on understanding the nature of the ‘good’. Anthropologists, it seems, have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, often remains understated. I would tend to share the view that abstract and isolated ethical guidelines constitute an alienation of ethics from the subject of anthropology (Meskell and Pels 2005) and, more insidiously, seek to absolve anthropologists from truly engaging with ethics. This chapter has not sought to develop its own alternative model of/for ethics in anthropology even though perhaps my own views on certain points have come through (scepticism of the ‘human rights’ model for one). This chapter, therefore, is simply the prelude to the formation of a more propositional model for an ethics of anthropology. Prior to such an undertaking deeper research into the genealogy of ethics in the discipline is required. This chapter has therefore limited itself to the following: (i) Foregrounding the importance of the ethical in anthropology by demonstrating the interconnection between the notion of ‘crises’ in anthropology and the ethical questions underpinning them. (ii) Contextualizing these crises from within the discipline with the broader geopolitical changes, including the rise of ‘crisis anthropology’ itself. (iii) Showing how the recent rise of interest in the anthropology of moralities can provide an opportunity to engage with the ethics of anthropology (See Caduff 2011) and the teleology of our own practice while also contributing to the philosophy of ethics.

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Jean-Paul Baldacchino is Professor and currently Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Malta and the Director of its Mediterranean Institute. He has published numerous articles on the anthropology of religion, emotions, psychoanalysis and popular culture. His regional expertise is in the Mediterranean and South Korea. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Mediterranean Studies, which he formerly edited, and on the board of the Australian Journal of Anthropology. His work has appeared in Social Compass, Ethnicities, the Australian Journal of Anthropology, Korea Journal, Asian Studies Review and The Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, among others.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. States of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. American Anthropological Association. 1967. Statement on Problems of Anthropological Research and Ethics, Adopted by the Council of the American Anthropological Association March 1967. Retrieved 11 March 2021 from https://www.americananthro.org/ ParticipateAndAdvocate/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1656. Bell, Kirsten. 2014. ‘Resisting Commensurability: Against Informed Consent as an Anthropological Virtue’, American Anthropologist 116(3): 511–22.   2018. ‘Moral Anthropology and a Priori Enunciations’, in Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 49–57. Cabot, Heath. 2019. ‘The Business of Anthropology and the European Refugee Regime’, American Ethnologist 46(3): 261–75. Caduff, Carlo. 2011. ‘Anthropology’s Ethics: Moral Positionalism, Cultural Relativism, and Critical Analysis’, Anthropological Theory 11(4): 465–80. Carrier, James G. 2012. ‘Anthropology after the Crisis’, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 64: 115–28. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus (eds) 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. D’Andrade, Roy. 1995. ‘Moral Models in Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 36(3): 399–408. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles: University of California Press.   2015. ‘What Does Ordinary Ethics Look Like?’ in Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin and Webb Keane, Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives. Chicago: Hau Books, pp. 56–127. Douzinas, Costas. 2001. ‘Human Rights, Humanism and Desire’, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 6(3): 183–206. EASA 2015. Why Anthropology Matters. Retrieved 24 February 2022 from https://easaonline.org/publications/policy/?fbclid=IwAR2egZLj8K61Yk96R 49a_IlOxUXAjRYPrtij8Mk-ln6239HFcrx192R9dJc.

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Fassin, Didier. 2008. ‘Beyond Good and Evil? Questioning the Anthropological Discomfort with Morals’, Anthropological Theory 8(4): 333–44. Geertz, Clifford. 1984. ‘Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-Relativism’, American Anthropologist 86(2): 263–78. Gold, Marina. 2018. ‘Moral Anthropology, Human Rights, and Egalitarianism, or the AAA boycott’, in Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 88–104. Guerts, Merlijn. 2015. ‘The Atrocity of Representing Atrocity. Watching Kevin Carter’s “Struggling Girl”’, Aesthetic Investigations 1(1): 1–13. Hakken, David. 1991. ‘Anthropological Ethics in the 1990s: A Positive Approach’, in Carolyn Fleuhr-Lobban (ed.), Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 72–95. Hart, Keith and Horacio Ortiz. 2008. ‘Anthropology in the Financial Crisis’, Anthropology Today 24(6): 1–3. Heatherington, Tracey and Filippo M. Zerilli. (eds). 2016. ‘Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy’, Anuac 5(1): 41–90. Heyman, Josiah McC. 2005. ‘Eric Wolf’s Ethical-political Humanism, and Beyond’, Critique of Anthropology 25(1): 13–25. Higgins, Rylan, Emily Martin and Maria D. Vesperi. 2020. ‘An Anthropology of the COVID-19 Pandemic’, Anthropology Now 12(1): 2–6. Horowitz, Irving Lewis. 1974 The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Iphofen, Ron. 2013. Research Ethics in Ethnography/Anthropology. European Commission. Retrieved 7 July 2018 from  http://ec.europa.eu/research/ participants/data/ref/h2020/other/hi/ethics-guide-ethnog-anthrop_en.pdf. Kapferer, Bruce and Marina Gold. 2018. ‘Introduction: Reconceptualising the Discipline’, in Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–27. Kirtsoglou, Elisabeth and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos, D. 2018. ‘Empathy, as Affective Ethical Technology and Transformative Political Praxis’, in Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold (eds), Moral Anthropology: A Critique. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 104–33. Knight, Daniel. 2013. ‘The Greek Economic Crisis as Trope’, Focaal 65: 147–59. Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311–32. Lambek, Michael. 2010. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham Press. Lewis, Diane. 1973. ‘Anthropology and Colonialism’, Current Anthropology 14(5): 581–602. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. ‘Anthropology: Its Achievements and Future’, Nature 209: 10–13.   2008 [1961]. ‘Today’s Crisis in Anthropology’, UNESCO Courier 5: 39–46. Marcus, George E. and Michael M.J. Fisher. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Marcus, George E. and Fernando Mascarenhas. 2005. Ocasião: The Marquis and the Anthropologist, a Collaboration. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Meskell, Lynn and Peter Pels. (eds) 2005. Embedding Ethics. Shifting Boundaries of the Anthropological Profession. Oxford: Berg. Rabinow, Paul. 1986. ‘Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and PostModernity in Anthropology’, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 234–62.   1988. ‘Beyond Ethnography: Anthropology as Nominalism’, Cultural Anthropology 3(4): 355–64. Ramsay, Georgina. 2020. ‘Time and the Other in Crisis: How Anthropology Makes Its Displaced Object’, Anthropological Theory 20(4): 385–413. Redden, Elizabeth. 2016. ‘Anthropology Group Won’t boycott Israel’, Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 24 February 2022 from https://www.insidehighered. com/news/2016/06/07/anthropology-group-rejects-resolution-boycott-israeliacademic-institutions. Robbins, Joel. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward and Anthropology of the Good’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 447–62. Robinson, Kathryn. 2004. ‘Chandra Jayawardena and the Ethical turn in Australian Anthropology’, Critique of Anthropology 24(4): 379–402. Salazar, Noel B. 2020. ‘Anthropology and Anthropologists in Times of Crisis’, Social Anthropology 28(2): 346–47. Schaumberg, Heike. 2010 [2008]. ‘Taking Sides in the Oilfields: For a Politically Engaged Anthropology’, in Heidi Armbruster and Anna Lærke (eds), Taking Sides: Ethics Politics and Fieldwork in Anthropology. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 199–217. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. ‘The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 36(3): 409–20. Smart, Alan. 2011. ‘The Humanism of Postmodernist Anthropology and the Post-Structuralist Challenges of Posthumanism’, Anthropologica 53(2): 332–34. Turner, Edith. 1993. ‘Experience and Poetics in Anthropological Writing’, in Paul Benson (ed), Anthropology and Literature. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 27–48. Venkatesan, Soumhya. (ed.). 2015. ‘There Is No Such Thing as the Good: The 2013 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory’, Critique of Anthropology 35(4): 430–80. Weston, Gavin and Natalie Djohari. 2020. Anthropological Controversies: The Crimes and Misdemeanors that Shaped a Discipline. New York: Routledge. Wolf, Eric R. and Joseph G. Jorgensen. 1970. ‘Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand’, New York Review of Books 19 November: 26–35. Wynn, Lisa L. and Mark Israel. 2018. ‘The Fetishes of Consent: Signatures, Paper, and Writing in Research Ethics Review’, American Anthropologist 120(4): 795–806.

Chapter 6

Higher-Education Crisis, Academic Personhood and Moral Labour Matthew Doyle and James McMurray

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his chapter draws on ethnographic data to analyse how transformations to the political economy of higher education in the United Kingdom have produced contradictions in the operation of British universities. These contradictions are experienced as a situation of personal moral conflict by many teaching and research staff, as they attempt to embody notions of academic personhood that are increasingly incompatible with the logics of the modern neoliberal university. This moral conflict is experienced particularly keenly by staff in temporary and precarious employment: as casual lecturers, seminar tutors, teaching fellows or postdoctoral ‘brains for hire’ within senior academics’ research projects. The rapid growth of such work in UK higher education has created a structural divide between precarious staff and those who still hold traditional, open-ended teaching and research positions (UCU 2019). Moreover, this divide functions to mitigate the contradictions effected by widespread financial, bureaucratic and managerial changes to the higher-education system. Although the political economy of contemporary higher education is incompatible with a traditional university model of teaching and scholarship, an approximation of this model is maintained through the hidden work of a ‘reserve army’ (UCU 2016) of precarious academics, who perform much of the teaching and research at UK higher-education institutions while partially insulating permanent staff from the moral dilemmas produced by the contradictions of the current system. Precarious staff therefore perform not only various forms of hidden labour but also a particular type of emotional labour (Hochschild 1983), through being obliged to negotiate conflicts between their personal ethics and the logics of the neoliberal university. Therefore, while precarious academics are treated as marginal within the university they are in fact central to its continued functioning as a social and educational

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institution. Meanwhile, the financial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic constitutes an exogenous shock to the entire higher-education system that is deepening and accelerating existing contradictions and trends. We argue that this makes it increasingly impossible for academics to disregard conflict between their personal ethics and the institutional environments in which they operate. This chapter is based on a Participatory Action Research project carried out at a research-intensive university in England. This initiative followed the leaking of Financial Review Guidelines (FRGs) circulated among university managers in response to the financial impact of the Covid-19 crisis. These guidelines appeared to call for the immediate termination of casual academic contracts. As a consequence of these events a series of informal conversations led to the formation of a network of precariously employed staff. This allowed people from across schools and departments to share experiences, gain a collective voice and make visible the various forms of hidden labour they carry out. This chapter begins by discussing the history of the British university and how transformations to its political economy have led to changes in its institutional logics and values, and prevailing notions of academic personhood. Currently there exists a tension between the dominant institutional logics of the neoliberal university and an older model of the university as a social institution. In the second section we consider, with reference to two ethnographic examples, the divide that has opened up in British universities between permanent and precariously employed academic staff. While the issue of precarity has been discussed as a political topic and a new form of subjectivity within academia (Shore and Davidson 2014), we argue that this divide is key to mediating the structural tensions within the current higher-education system. Consequently, permanent and precarious academics experience moral conflict differently, with precarious staff being forced to carry out the bulk of what we refer to as ‘moral labour’. In the third section we discuss events that took place at our fieldsite in 2020 and how the impacts of the Covid-19 crisis were experienced by the university community. We conclude by considering the possible future of academic life and the moral traditions of the university.

A History of British Universities and Academic Personhood We propose that academia constitutes an occupation in which people’s personal identities and moralities are bound up with ideas of their professional roles to the extent that these can be regarded as expressions of

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ethical personhood: the models individuals judge themselves and others against and which they attempt to embody, often through processes of apprenticeship and self-fashioning (Laidlaw 2014; Macintyre 1981). This is owed to the history of European universities. This history is characterized by an interplay between wider socio-economic changes – the instrumental purposes for which governments and elite social groups have recognized, tolerated and supported universities and their semiautonomous nature – which produces non-instrumental forms of value. Ruling elites have viewed universities as a means of creating useful bodies of knowledge, preparing the ruling classes to enter high society and government, and training civil servants or middle-class professionals (Collini 2012). Yet, at the same time, they have pursued goods defined by their shared practices as communities of scholars. The philosopher Alasdair Macintyre (1981) terms such goods ‘internal’ to social practices in contrast to ‘external’ goods that are attached to them by ‘the accidents of social circumstance’ (1981: 188). To illustrate, he describes how someone may teach an uninterested child the game of chess through offering them sweets in exchange for winning. Eventually the child will learn the internal goods that come with developing greater skill at and understanding of the game itself, and will become motivated by these. Practices, like the game of chess, are made up of communities of teachers and learners, with each individual fulfilling these roles at different moments. They are also traditions, in which the rules and standards through which internal goods are recognized are inherited from the past. These can be challenged or transformed from within, but only in a way that is consistent with the tradition. For Macintyre it is through understanding and embodying the virtues necessary to excel at the practices entailed by one’s role within a community and its tradition that it is possible to exercise ethical personhood. Universities clearly represent communities whose practices are motivated by internal goods and where individuals attempt to embody specific virtues associated with their roles and statuses. Scholars learn and act according to the research methods, history, standards of judgement and pedagogical techniques of their disciplines, alongside the unspoken obligations implied by their roles within a scholarly community and its shared traditions. This has led academics to direct teaching and research in ways that are independent of practical value. We argue that the interplay between the non-instrumental logics and values of scholarly communities and the changing exigencies of ruling elites has produced a ‘double movement’ (Polanyi 2000), in which scholarly practices or disciplines that were originally intended to serve an instrumental purpose become inwardly directed towards second-order enquiries concerning

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the basis of the knowledge they produce and its boundaries, limitations and ultimate ends. For example, the study of oriental languages and anthropology were originally regarded as a means of training colonial administrators but became elaborated into academic disciplines focused on various internal goals (Collini 2012). Nevertheless, the disinterested pursuit of scholarship directed by standards and goods internal to the practices of an academic community often leads to the production of innovative knowledge that holds instrumental value for government, business or the military. Moreover, the education provided by universities involves scholars working at the frontiers of their disciplines teaching students the limitations, boundaries and presuppositions of systems of knowledge in such a way that concepts and propositions are necessarily questioned and relativized. Through understanding the contested, partial and overlapping character of systems of knowledge students can gain their own perspectives on them and independently construct knowledge for themselves. While the sort of critical thinking this produces can have liberatory or revolutionary potentials (Freire 2017) it is also essential to the reproduction of the modern capitalist economy, through endowing scientists, creative professionals, innovators and leaders with these abilities. Consequently, universities are distinguished by serving external and internal goods – or, in Weberian terms (1978), of combining instrumentalrational and value-rational action in their institutional practices. This explains why it is often difficult to justify the traditional model of the university in contemporary public discourse. In modern capitalism there exists a separation between those spheres of social life – such as the family, religion or art – that allow for the possibility of value and in which internal goods are pursued, and those based on rational instrumental calculation – primarily, the sphere of the market and commodity exchange. In addition, some social goods and the public institutions that provide them are understood in purely non-instrumental terms. In the United Kingdom this is arguably the case with public healthcare and the National Health Service, which was famously described by the Conservative politician Nigel Lawson as ‘the closest thing the British people have to a religion’ (Toynbee 2018). However, the university, as an institution directed towards both external and internal goods, is difficult to categorize or justify in the modern world. This is increasingly the case for national governments driven by technocratic market ideologies. Meanwhile, the historical double movement between the designs of governments and ruling elites and universities’ internal practices, values and traditions has shaped the successive notions of ethical personhood held by academics.

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Universities emerged as part of the medieval guild system, in which specialists within particular occupations formed associations to regulate their profession. The original word universitas denotes a group of scholars incorporated into a society or community rather than a physical space such as a modern campus, although over time universities began to hire or rent facilities and were granted juridical status and collective legal rights by medieval European states. Despite originally focusing on educating the clergy, they became centres of study in law, philosophy, the training of state functionaries and the education of elites. The ecclesiastical character of universities began to disappear in the nineteenth century as higher education throughout the Western world expanded alongside the emergence of industrial capitalism, the growth of state bureaucracies and specialized middle-class professionals, and the need for scientific research to support national industry. Universities took on the role of educating the new professionals and bureaucrats while promoting scientific innovation and national culture. The modern university, which emerged during this time, largely conforms to the educational ideals of the philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, who founded the University of Berlin. According to the Humboldtian model, universities should be understood as autonomous communities of scholars and students that combine teaching and research based on the disinterested pursuit of the truth as an integrated process. This permits students to share in the creation of academic knowledge and to become autonomous citizens by developing their reasoning abilities in an environment of academic freedom. Education is viewed as a lifelong process of self-cultivation and research guided by internal scientific rather than market objectives. While German universities most closely followed these ideals, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the end of the duopoly on higher education in England by Oxford and Cambridge and the construction of ‘redbrick’ institutions, which approximated to the Humboldtian model. Moreover, the liberal ideals of higher education of this period continue to serve as the tacit model of the university for contemporary academics and to influence their practices and notions of academic personhood. However, what a colleague of ours refers to as ‘the era of the leather armchairs’ is perhaps looked back upon with uncritical nostalgia (Berg and Mills 2010). Academia remained a deeply elitist and exclusionary enterprise that operated through networks of patronage and reproduced a limited and conservative perspective on the world (2010). Yet the fact that universities remained autonomous institutions outside of the system of market relations was significant. Moreover, although the nineteenth century was the high point of laissez-faire capitalism, this autonomy was seen as a

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virtue. According to the prevailing political and economic philosophy of classical liberalism, the best protection for liberty and civilization is a pluralist civil society of self-governing institutions (Mill 2006; von Humboldt 2009). As we shall see presently neoliberalism, which seeks to open all of society to the operation of market forces, is quite different (Harvey 2007). With the broadly social-democratic consensus that followed the Second World War access to higher education expanded significantly. In simple terms Western societies during this period were distinguished by sustained economic growth under a Keynesian model, which facilitated a tacit agreement between labour and capital to share the proceeds of increases in productivity and the expansion of state institutions that primarily benefited the working class. The result was an enlargement of positive rights, which helped sustain diverse movements within Western societies to pursue the extension of social privileges to historically marginalized and excluded categories of people such as the working class, women and minority ethnic groups. In the United Kingdom during the period between the early 1960s and the 1980s, university status was awarded to various institutions and new ‘plate glass’ universities were constructed. In 1962, a universal system of student maintenance grants was created and a year later the Robbins Report recommended the expansion of higher education made available on a meritocratic basis. New generations of students began to challenge the model of education, best summarized by Max Weber’s (2004) notion of academia as a disinterested and apolitical vocation, demanding their professors recognize their complicity in ongoing forms of inequality and oppression. The tradition and practices of critical social science and pedagogy (Freire 2017) that developed within this milieu were an evolution of nineteenthcentury ideals in a more radically democratic direction. Within certain currents of disciplines such as anthropology or sociology the role of the social scientist became one of not just studying society but of doing so in order to positively transform it, often through identifying forms of domination and oppression and ‘speaking truth to power’. Similarly, helping students develop critical thinking and the capacity to independently produce knowledge can be a method of liberating and empowering them. Such ideas became prevalent within the social sciences as higher education continued to expand in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to become a mass system. In the 1980s a series of political and economic changes, often referred to as neoliberalism (Harvey 2007), began to transform the internal political economy of universities. These can be divided into shifts in the ideology of governing elites and substantive economic changes (2007).

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Governments, like those of Margaret Thatcher, influenced by the ideas of monetarism and the Chicago School of economics, pursued mass privatization and new forms of public management under the belief that the extension of the market and its logic of rational calculation into all spheres of society was the best way of ensuring efficiency, transparency and freedom. At the same time the economy became increasingly financialized – meaning that, in Marxist terms, the centre of gravity of surplus extraction moved from wages to rent extraction (Graeber 2014) – while entire spheres of society that had previously been maintained outside of the market were converted into areas for various forms of capital accumulation (Harvey 2007). The effects of these changes on universities are complex but can be summarized as follows: (i) public disinvestment in higher education and a move towards universities obtaining income through the commercialization of research and education, with a corresponding shift in the value of higher education from being conceived of as a public good to a private investment in one’s own career; (ii) the belief on the part of governments and management that universities should ensure ‘accountability’ to the taxpayer and student ‘customer’, placing pressure on humanities subjects and emphasizing instrumental research; (iii) the implementation of administrative systems derived from the corporate sector for the measurement of efficiency or excellence in services; (iv) a change of internal hierarchy in which a class of professional managers, increasingly drawn from the corporate and financial sectors, has taken control of universities; and lastly (v) the widespread casualization of academic labour. (Shore and Davidson 2014). In the United Kingdom these transformations to higher education took place in two stages. During the 1980s and 1990s British universities were reformed according to ideas of New Public Management, in which various forms of audit were introduced to measure the quality of teaching and research and to provide efficiency and value for money. These include the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and, later, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and various ‘teaching quality’ assessments that apply statistical metrics to establish rankings and access to funding. What started simply as a means of measuring performance became a system whose instrumental–rational logics largely replaced the internal practices and goods of academic communities as a means for determining the direction of research and teaching. This process intensified

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following the abolition of the universal student-grant system in favour of student loans and tuition fees in the late 1990s. In 2011 the ‘block grant’ system – which had allocated funding for teaching on a per-student basis – was abolished, alongside caps on student numbers. Institutions were permitted to charge yearly tuition fees of up to £9,000, creating a competitive market in higher education and making universities largely dependent on fees for income. The result has been an increase in ‘audit culture’ (Strathern 2000) and a deepening of the divide between corporatized university management and academic faculty. University Vice Chancellors have pursued aggressive expansion plans to recruit increasing numbers of domestic and international students. Such plans require substantial infrastructure investment funded by borrowing on capital markets. Consequently, British universities are now servicing billions of pounds in private debt owed to banks and hedge funds. Combined with the rise of privately funded student accommodation and student debt, universities have thus become a key element of the system of rent extraction that underlies contemporary financialized capitalism. These changes mark a fundamental break in centuries of tradition for British universities, which now operate as commercial enterprises governed by professional managers. Various scholars have argued in Foucauldian terms that this has shaped academics’ subjectivities such that they internalize neoliberal logics and become unwittingly complicit in them (Mitchell 2016; Shore and Davidson 2014). Others have commented that many contemporary academics have abandoned the pursuit of academia’s internal goods to pursue their own careers in a self-seeking game (Graeber 2014). While there is undoubtedly truth to both these claims we contend that many academics operating in this environment experience profoundly uncomfortable moral conflicts. They still attempt to embody models of ethical personhood on a spectrum between the ideal types of the Weberian liberal scholar and the critical scholar–activist, to which are attached specific virtues and role obligations that conflict with the institutional logics of the universities they work for. For example, the pursuit of research driven by the practices of a discipline in a spirit of intellectual humility and disinterested pursuit of truth conflicts with the need to pursue funding from third parties, to prove the instrumental value of research and to publish in ‘top’ journals. The commodification of education; the pressure to reduce courses to ‘edutainment’ to recruit students and to score well in evaluations; and the sweating of assets by university managers, resulting in vastly increased class sizes, make teaching critical thinking increasingly difficult. Meanwhile, the pressures placed on academics by audit regimes to constantly excel in a hypercompetitive environment mean that being generous with one’s

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time, working collaboratively and caring about the welfare of students and colleagues become luxuries one can scarcely afford. Such conflicts are experienced frequently as moral dilemmas. However, it is precarious staff who face such dilemmas most frequently and acutely, as we illustrate in the following section.

Precarity and Moral Labour The issue of academic precarity and the emergence of an academic ‘precariat’ has recently gained some prominence via the work of the Europewide PrecAnthro Collective of precariously employed anthropologists on employment conditions throughout the continent (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020). While precarity is becoming a defining feature of academic and non-academic careers throughout the world, the UK, as the home of one of the largest-higher education systems, is ahead of the curve in global processes of commercialization and therefore representative of how long-term trends will continue to shape the experience of academic life. Crucially, the precaritization of academia in the UK has resulted in the emergence of a two-tier workforce. While formal academic tenure was abolished in the 1980s and British academics, unlike some of their European counterparts, are employees of private university corporations and not civil servants, it remained the norm to employ junior scholars on relatively secure, indefinite contracts that designated teaching and research as equal components of the job. Historically this has meant that the UK has allowed early career researchers to gain permanent employment at a much earlier stage than in other systems, without the need to pass through lengthy processes of training, assessment and selection. However, the proliferation of casual and temporary teaching contracts and short-term postdoctoral positions as part of the larger projects of senior staff has resulted in the growth of a precaritized academic ‘underclass’, who perform roughly 50 per cent of the overall teaching and research load but depend on fixed-term contracts that give limited access to vital securities (UCU 2016; 2019). The full implications of this two-tier workforce have not been fully assimilated by trade-union bureaucracies and branch offices at universities – which remain focused mostly on demands that predominantly affect permanent academic staff, who are often those who end up exploiting precarious and early career researchers (Ivancheva 2020). This is despite the fact that the national Universities and College Union (UCU) has taken the issue of precarity seriously and made the elimination of casual contracts part of its demands in a national strike voted on in

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2019. Other scholars (Ivancheva 2020; Ivancheva, Lynch and Keating 2019) have observed that precariously employed staff cover teaching and administrative tasks to allow senior academics to engage in more prestigious research activities, while also being responsible for the majority of the emotional labour (Hochschild 1983) involved with frontline teaching. This exploitation serves to mitigate the structural contradictions of the present higher-education system, in which massified universities dependent on fee income seek to increase student numbers while simultaneously attempting to reduce costs and maintain prestige through performance in assessments of research excellence. However, we argue that precarious staff also perform the majority of the ‘moral labour’ at British universities and in doing so also help mitigate the structural tensions between the commercial logics of the neoliberal university and the moral traditions of academic life. The concept of moral labour has emerged in the literature twice, and with distinct emphases. Its earlier appearance related straightforwardly to that labour which is necessary to fulfil a moral duty (Shue 1988). Its more recent and subtle conceptualization draws parallels with Hochschild’s ‘emotional labour’, which she described as the commodified form of the work required to ‘induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ (Hochschild 1983: 7), as those in service industries, for example, are required to do when working with the public. Moral labour, in this tradition, refers to the ‘immaterial’ (see Hardt 1999; Fechter 2016) work required in various professions to accommodate disparities between what is right and what is possible, as a result of either material conditions or institutional restrictions (Fechter 2016). Our use of the term here draws on both conceptualizations to include both the unrecognized or unremunerated labour undertaken by precarious academics as a result of their structural position and adherence to the ideals of scholarship, and their relatively heavy engagement with intractable moral requirements both as a result of their generally ‘frontline’ positions in teaching roles and of the inability of secure staff to clearly see the disparity in positions. In the period leading up to the formation of an organized group of precarious academics in our fieldsite, and during the following months of campaigning, both issues were frequent topics of discussion amongst the precarious staff at the university. Here, we provide two examples to demonstrate the disproportionate weight of moral labour shouldered by precarious staff. Both are drawn from interviews with active participants in the campaigns against the mistreatment of precarious staff in the spring and summer of 2020. The first outlines the experiences of a researcher who left for a further precarious position in early 2021,

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and the second those of a scholar who left academia as a result of their inability to secure a stable academic job.

Sophia Sophia was a recent Ph.D. graduate in social science. She had worked in various positions over the course of her doctorate, although – due to her position as an international student and the various visa restrictions on the employment of full-time students – this had been insufficient to support her during her studies. Furthermore, such restrictions meant that in the period following the completion of her degree she had a very narrow window in which to find full-time work with an organization able to sponsor a new work visa; failure to do so would make it legally impossible to remain in the country. Whilst she had previously been interested in working with non-profit organizations and NGOs, these were unable to afford such sponsorship and Sophia was consequently limited largely to employment by universities. These circumstances increased the desperation of her precarity and, consequently, her vulnerability to exploitation. ‘We were precarious academics who were pigeonholed further. Even if we wanted to move out of academia – because there were better jobs out there – we have to keep all our eggs in the academia basket … we’re sort of propelled into this very precarious academic job market with the potential dangling carrot at the end of the tunnel. You might get a visa out of it if you managed to beat out a hundred other people for this one fixed-term contract.

The contracts under which she had been employed had changed a number of times, and Sophia didn’t have a clear picture of exactly how her academic work was remunerated. However, the hourly rates and the multipliers (according to which final pay is calculated as a fixed ‘multiple’ of contact hours to include lesson preparation, administrative and student support work) in no way reflected the time it took her to do her work well: There’s just no way, feasibly … for most doctoral tutors – even experienced doctoral tutors – to be able to manage to pull that all together, between the readings and preparing slides, seminar notes, etc. in the time for which you’re paid.

However, Sophia – like other precarious scholars – continued to work these extra hours despite the need to focus on producing publications that might secure her a more stable position, due to what she called the ‘ethical conflict’ of balancing student experience with her own limited resources. She felt that working only the hours she was paid would cause

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the quality of teaching to suffer, stating that ‘my students deserve better than that’. Part of the imperative towards additional labour, then, came from a sense of responsibility to the students which diverged from that accepted by the institution; she identified student responses to her teaching as a key element of the motivation for the extra work she did. There is nothing exclusive in this experience: academics at all levels are similarly subject to demands for free labour. However, as Sophia’s experience demonstrates, this shared exploitation is part of the problem as one consequence of it is that complaints ‘fall on deaf ears’. Whilst it is generally recognized by colleagues that precarious staff – particularly hourly-paid staff – are paid less for the work they do, the conditions that lock them into precarity are often only partially the product of immediate institutional organization, as wider systemic elements also contribute – and consequently, the degree of disparity between permanent and precarious staff is not always obvious. For Sophia this meant that the collegiality characteristic of academia became increasingly difficult. The long-established culture of academic institutions is maintained in the practices and habits of permanent staff: participation in the intellectual life of the department, attendance at seminars, mentoring, etc. These are expected elements of academic life: either formal requirements of permanent contracts or obligatory informal standards. But whilst these are implicit to academia as vocation, they are – for hourly-paid, precarious staff – unremunerated forms of labour that detract from time spent on tasks (such as publishing) necessary to obtain secure employment. This, again, positions precarious staff between incommensurable expectations and necessities, mirroring – in Sophia’s relationship with permanent staff – the experience of moral labour necessitated by dealing with students: That precarious situation usually means that you become a ‘yes person’ – like ‘Yes I will organize this seminar series. Yes, of course I will mentor these Masters and Ph.D. students so that such-and-such faculty member can go on research leave’. So, you become a yes person because you obviously are in a situation where you’re trying to turn that precarious position into a permanent contract or longer-term contract. So, you want to be seen as a team player. You want to be seen as somebody who is not just a great researcher but someone who is also a great teacher, a great member of a team.

As the Covid-19 pandemic worsened, and remote learning became necessary, the expectations of secure staff led to disproportionate labour being asked of early career researchers, who represent the preponderance of precarious staff. For Sophia, this was particularly the case as a consequence of the new requirements for remote teaching:

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There’s a certain demographic of people who are more tech-savvy and can move their lessons online more easily and we’re relied upon a lot more than older senior member members of faculty and had to do a lot of hand holding. For a lot of us these kinds of expectations became even more exacerbated over the last year, because in addition to doing all of our own work like a lot of us were expected to hand-hold a lot of people who are in much more secure positions.

The characteristic collegiality of academia and its tradition of euphemizing hierarchies make such hidden exploitation difficult to make explicit and address. As Mary Leighton has argued with reference to relations of gender and class in academia (2020), the ‘performative informality’ of academic communities is rooted in a meritocratic ideology that ignores and consequently reproduces inequality; as Bellas (1999) has argued, the gendered reward structure in academia is such that the emotional labour disproportionately expected of women is largely unrecognized. Similarly, one’s ability to ‘fit in’ is broadly read as a function of individual personality rather than, for example, material circumstances. It was such issues that led Sophia to join other precarious academics who were organizing in the face of leaked financial guidance from the university executive that seemed to indicate that all staff without secure contracts were to be ‘terminated as soon as possible’ wherever able, as we discuss in the third section.

Solomon Solomon was an early member of the same group of precarious academics who organized a network among themselves. A mature student from a working-class background, he had previously pursued a career in a trade. Following completion of his Ph.D. he held a number of full-time but brief, fixed-term postdoctoral positions. Whilst these provided limited periods of financial stability they were interspersed with large gaps ‘in between which you’re just scraping together any little bit of work that you can find’. In consequence, ‘it means that when you have got a fixedterm contract you still have to worry about money, because you know that it’s coming: that period of not having much work’. During these periods he, like Sophia, worked as much as possible in hourly paid teaching roles, and found that the amount of labour required to do the work to an appropriate standard was far in excess of what he was paid for. You kind of think ‘I must be getting paid a fair amount; someone’s figured it out, someone’s calculated it’ and then I’d look at how much time I was putting in and it wasn’t the same as what I was getting paid for, so then I thought

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maybe I’m not doing it right, or maybe it’s my fault, I need to just accept that I need to work harder.

Such statements were characteristic of Solomon’s perspective on academia. Despite his success in securing multiple postdoctoral positions, his inability both to meet his own standards of tuition in the time he was paid for and to find a permanent role had led him to conclude (in contrast to Sophia) that he was ‘not quite good enough’ for academia. Imposter syndrome – the sense that one is unqualified for one’s own career, and will sooner or later be ‘found out’ by colleagues – is endemic amongst early career academics and particularly amongst working-class scholars. In Solomon’s case this was exacerbated by his need to accommodate the disparities between performing his role in a manner that would provide his students with the education that both he and they expected and the realities of precarious scholarship. Ultimately, this led to him abandoning an academic career. He emphasized the way in which the divergence between the effort he was expending to perform his job well and his treatment by the university gradually eroded his willingness to engage in additional labour to meet the needs of his students: Initially, I would work more [than I was paid for] because I, you know, wanted to stay in academia and I had a lot of goodwill. But then, with the pandemic and then the way the university reacted to that I lost the goodwill element, and I did start to look at how much time I was spending on each task. And then I was quite strict with that and I just worked to what I was paid to do. I was able to manage it, but not to the way that I felt that it was like the best that I could do.

The commercial rationality of the university was experienced starkly by Solomon during this time. Whilst being paid hourly for his teaching he was earning between five and ten thousand pounds per year for the modules he was assigned. His experience is common – contemporary statistics are thin, but between the 1980s and 2010 working-class representation in academia increased very little, from 17 to 23 per cent (Rickett and Morris 2020) – a dramatic under-representation of the 60 per cent of the British population who self-identify as working class (Evans and Mellon 2016). It is clear that the expense of attempting to move from graduate study to academic work contributes to this figure, as many working-class academics lack the means to survive on the very low income usually earned by casual academic staff (Clare 2020). The structural impediments to securing permanent roles experienced by both Sophia and Solomon underline the ways in which precarity can contribute to the onerous burden of moral labour in academia, as

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precarious academics attempt to balance the expectations of both students and permanent staff with the material realities of their circumstances. Engaged in various forms of unremunerated work as a result, they are less able to dedicate time to producing original scholarship. This serves to further limit the possibility of securing a permanent role – and, as was often complained about amongst the members of Sussex Precarious Academics (SPA), produces conditions that lead to those precarious academics who have been relegated to teaching-only positions questioning whether they can consider themselves scholars at all. It is an uncomfortable irony that the years of training spent in achieving a doctorate are focused on acquiring the skills to produce original, self-directed research but that, increasingly, this actually qualifies new Ph.D.’s only to teach students on a similar path. Even where a postdoctoral research position can be secured scope for original research is limited as such positions are increasingly confined to roles on existing projects. As one member of the SPA commented, these temporary positions often place precarious scholars in the role of ‘brain for hire’, unable to pursue original or controversial ideas and limited to the relatively narrow area to which they have been assigned. Compromise of this sort is perhaps part and parcel of academia at any level, but precarity reproduces these experiences iteratively – sometimes simultaneously. The scramble for paid employment at the end of one’s current contract, year or term and the perpetual need to apply for highly competitive and invariably torturously specific openings requires a constant reinvention of one’s interests, skills and background, and produces a consequent erosion of intellectual integrity. This is likely to have longterm consequences for the work of even those who manage to secure permanent positions.

The Impacts of the Covid Crisis As was discussed in the first section, crises have in a sense always been inherent to the university as an institution and its historical development due to the tension between the instrumental purposes for which governments and elite social groups have recognized, tolerated and supported universities and their semi-autonomous nature as communities of learning that embody lived moral traditions. The relationship between academic authorities and political or religious elites has never been entirely smooth, and this tension alongside broader socio-economic changes has shaped the different historical models of the university. However, to speak of higher-education crisis in the present period of

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neoliberal reform refers to the possibility of a fundamental break with the university as a semi-autonomous social institution governed by internal goods such as the pursuit of truth or the creation of intelligent, autonomous and democratically minded human beings (Amilburu 2014; Kalb 2021). Meanwhile, the ‘Covid crisis’, which affected UK universities from early 2020, represented an exogenous shock that accelerated and deepened these trends. The result has been the heightening of contradictions between the current, marketized system of higher education and the values still held by many academics. By March of 2020, UK university managers were already predicting that the financial impact of Covid-19 would be a disaster for the sector. One of the reasons for this is the increased reliance on international student fees, particularly from China, which account for up to 20 per cent of total income at some institutions (Drayton and Waltman 2020). This is especially the case among elite universities, who use overseas-fees income to cross-subsidize the costs of research – allowing them to retain their ranking in league tables through high performance in ‘academic beauty contests’ such as the REF. Unlike their North American counterparts, British universities do not have large reserves or endowment funds running into billions. Yet many institutions have committed themselves to aggressive expansion plans involving massive infrastructure spending, and in some cases the construction of overseas satellite campuses in Asia or the Gulf states (Drayton and Waltman 2020). This expansion has been funded by high levels of borrowing. It was predicted across the sector that although domestic students did not face international travel restrictions, many would delay entry until the following year to avoid disruption caused by Covid. In March 2020 the university at which we were conducting fieldwork predicted a drop in international fee income of over 50 per cent and a 10 per cent drop in home and EU fee income. In response, the Vice Chancellor communicated to staff that to ensure financial solvency it would be necessary to ‘accelerate’ planned changes to the structure of the university. Although it remains unclear what this ‘acceleration’ refers to it is suspected that it means moving the university to a ‘teaching-led’ model, which would mean changing staff contracts and responsibilities (McGettigan 2020). The seriousness of this situation for this and other institutions was aggravated by the fact that the Conservative government rejected the bailout package proposed by the organization of Vice Chancellors, Universities UK. Moreover, as the British system is essentially a market in which higher-education providers compete to attract undergraduate students the fear of many institutions was that the most elite ‘Russell Group’ universities would ‘poach’ students by lowering

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entry requirements, worsening the situation for those below them in the league tables. At our fieldsite, one of the first responses by management was to effectively dismiss casual and precarious staff. In late March 2020 a Financial Review Guidelines (FRG) document was leaked that called for the ‘immediate termination’ of contracts for temporary and casual employees and the review of all fixed-term contracts alongside a tranche of other measures aimed at reducing costs, which included banning tea and coffee in departmental meetings. The leaking of the FRGs caused a great deal of outrage among casual and temporary staff, who, as discussed, had already been working a considerable amount of unpaid overtime to transfer teaching online. This led to a series of conversations between staff across different departments and schools, in which individuals shared their experiences and common grievances. Eventually, this led to discussions concerning how to resist the proposed changes and to make visible the work and conditions of precarious staff. This was formalized as a campaign group, which grew in numbers in a short space of time and divided itself into numerous working groups, including groups on contract protections, highlighting the hidden value of precarious labour and imagining alternative visions of the university. Notably, all this organizing activity was carried out via remote-working and video-conferencing software at the height of the first UK national lockdown. By creating a united front that gave collective expression to all precariously employed staff, it was able to gain clarification from senior management over the FRGs. These were eventually reissued in a revised format and it was made clear that existing contracts would be honoured. However, one of the group’s main achievements has been the collection of data on the personal experiences and forms of hidden labour carried out by precarious staff. This took the form of online surveying and a Participatory Action Research programme in which colleagues discussed common problems in small groups led by a facilitator. Some of these results have already been synthesized in this chapter, especially in our analysis of the nature of moral labour performed by precarious staff. A common reported experience was a sensation of being treated as dispensable by senior university management and of systemic silences in academia on the matter of social class. One colleague reported that they felt discussing money in relation to casual academic work was a taboo, and that doing so with line managers or colleagues provoked discomfort and scarcely concealed hostility. These issues took on a fresh dimension in September 2020 when universities opened for the new academic year. Unlike institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge this university committed itself to providing

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face-to-face teaching in the year 2020–21. Members of the campaign group believe this decision was largely motivated by fears that a limited pool of students would be poached by more elite institutions alongside the need to guarantee income from student accommodation and services, which accounts for over 10 per cent of total operating revenue. Additionally, private student accommodation is now a vast industry worth approximately £50 billion in the UK and is a major source of profit for global financial capital. As had taken place at other universities, a severance scheme was introduced to reduce staffing costs. Nevertheless, when students were admitted through the national Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS) a record proportion of young people applied for places and the institution where we performed fieldwork exceeded its recruitment quotas. Although casual and temporary staff were retained there had been pressure from senior management to reduce school and departmental budgets. Combined with the loss of full-time members of staff this meant that overall staff workloads increased substantially and gaps in teaching were plugged by overworked ‘teaching fellows’ and temporary lecturers, while casual staff were required to do more work for less pay. Precarious staff have reported feeling pressured to agree to provide face-to-face teaching even though the UCU university union declared this unsafe due to the risk of Covid transmission, calling on management to move all teaching online. As the university had agreed to a ‘blended’ model that combined online and face-to-face teaching, this raised the issue of the division of labour in providing face-to-face classes. In some departments senior academics and heads of department cooperated in shielding staff from face-to-face teaching, particularly casualized staff, on the principle that the most vulnerable academic workers should not be obliged to assume the greatest risks. However, this was not the case in other schools, where colleagues reported that they were expected to lead face-to-face classes to allow more senior colleagues to work from home. What these experiences and the overall situation produced by the Covid-19 crisis illustrate are the fundamental contradictions between the logics of the neoliberal university and the more traditional values still held by most academics, premised on the expectation that the university operate as a semi-autonomous social institution governed by the internal goods of an academic community of teachers and learners. In major university cities throughout the UK millions of students returned from the summer break and travelled from their family homes as they were told this was necessary for their education – even though in many cases teaching was moved entirely online within weeks of the start of term. In some of the largest university cities young people were crammed

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into university or privately operated halls of residence in which over a thousand students may share the same building. Inevitably, there were large outbreaks of Covid-19, which led to universities placing private security and fences around halls to prevent students from mixing with the general population – a situation described by some legal experts as unlawful detention (Britton 2020). Although the institution in which we conducted fieldwork avoided some of the more unedifying spectacles witnessed elsewhere, various students engaged in a rent strike to protest at being treated as ‘cash cows’ by a university that – in their own words – cared more about collecting rent and fees than protecting their safety and providing them with a meaningful education. The members of the precarious academics’ campaign group have suggested that the concerns expressed by students are well founded and should be listened to. In quasi-Marxist terms, these events demonstrate the contradiction between education as use-value and commodity. In plain language, they show that the neoliberal university functions to serve the need to extract various forms of rent rather than the human needs and values of a community of students and teachers. The most likely outcome of the present situation is an acceleration of current trends and the resolution of the structural contradictions within the operation of universities. In practical terms this means the elimination of teaching and research contracts and the autonomy traditionally enjoyed by academic workers, alongside the total extension of systems of auditing based on market logics to every aspect of academic life. This is most likely to affect those institutions that fall outside of the most elite, research-intensive group as the need to expand student recruitment requires a move to a teaching-led model, which would remove the ‘dual economy’ of teaching and research and the autonomy this has bestowed on permanent staff. Talk of ‘acceleration’ by university management and the ‘strategic framework’ outlined in official university documentation suggest that these sorts of changes are planned at our own research site. The effect could be both to remove the dual economy of teaching and research and to collapse the existing two-tier staff structure of precariously employed/teaching-focused staff and permanent teach-andresearch staff into one category of hyper-exploited academic worker.

Crisis, Solidarity and the Future of Academia The future of the university as an institution – and academia as a moral tradition – is contingent upon the capability of scholars to accommodate and surpass tensions between the standards of excellence that define

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its practices and the instrumental–rational logics of commercialized education. Such tensions, as we have shown, are currently experienced disproportionately by precarious scholars whose moral labour allows permanent staff to continue to operate as if – and perhaps believing that – the academy is not facing fundamental change. The experiences of Sophia and Solomon are particular to them but also representative of the way in which the tradition of academia – established, as we have described, over centuries – now provides the basis for forms of exploitation that utilize the disparity between the internal goods of academia and the commercial interests of the university. The experience of these casualized academic labourers is representative of that of precarious workers – the so-called ‘precariat’ – more generally and is particularly similar to that of precarious workers in the creative industries, as outlined by Gill and Pratt (2008: 14): [Such workers are characterized by …] a preponderance of temporary, intermittent and precarious jobs; long hours and bulimic patterns of working; the collapse or erasure of boundaries between work and play; poor pay; high levels of mobility; passionate attachment to the work and to the identity of creative labourer … ; informal working environments and distinctive forms of sociality; and profound experiences of insecurity and anxiety about finding work, earning enough money and ‘keeping up’ in rapidly changing fields.

Like those in the creative industries, academics are – as noted by Weber (2004) and various others since (Ross 2000) – characteristically wedded to their profession as a defining element of their identities. Emerging scholars do not expect a clear division between work and other elements of their lives. Yet while the conversations, collaborations and contemplations that characterize academia are not explicitly remunerated they have historically been made possible by the stability of secure contracts and reliable wages. The extension of commercial rationality into this realm has been productive of the precarity now endemic amongst early career academics but also, as our examples show, gradually erodes the goodwill, collegiality and enthusiasm that are key elements of both highquality teaching and the production of new research. The coronavirus and subsequent sector-wide crisis in higher education have brought these issues into sharp focus, and the experiences of precarious scholars during this period provide a glimpse of the likely future of academia. While their moral labour helps mediate the tensions between commercial logics and the practices and values that have defined the traditions of the university, the Covid crisis has heightened these contradictions to the point at which such accommodation is increasingly untenable. The personal and professional demands placed on all staff

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will most probably become incompatible with maintaining the forms of teaching and research through which scholars pursue the internal goods of academia. They may eventually abandon the traditional models of academic personhood outlined above, as the discordance between personal values and institutional logics produces intolerable levels of ethical unease and moral labour. Notwithstanding, should academics at different career stages develop networks of solidarity and organization to act collectively and to articulate an oppositional vision of the university it may be possible to resist or even reverse some of the changes of the last thirty years. Yet this depends on the ability of academic staff to see themselves not only as workers with shared interests but also as members of a shared moral tradition. Matthew Doyle is Lecturer in Anthropology at University College London. His Ph.D. (Sussex, 2019) examined the political institutions of a Quechua-speaking indigenous community in Bolivia and their relationship with the national ‘Movement Towards Socialism’ government. His research interests cover the contemporary politics of the Latin American left, highland Indigenous peoples and the effects of constitutional and legal reform on the governance of local communities. He is codirector of the Sussex Social Science and Ethics Research Group, an interdisciplinary network of academics interested in the empirical study of ethics and morality. James McMurray is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. His Ph.D. (Sussex, 2017) examined the educational, linguistic and religious choices of Uiyghur in Xinjiang province, China. His work demonstrated that these choices were both pragmatic and ethical, as people of this Muslim minority group sought to navigate the increasingly vigorous attempts by an increasingly repressive Chinese state to assert Han Chinese hegemony. He is codirector of the Sussex Social Science and Ethics Research Group, an interdisciplinary network of academics interested in the empirical study of ethics and morality.

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References Amilburu, Maria G. 2014. ‘What’s New in the University’s Current Crisis’, Procedia: Social and Behavioural Sciences 116: 686–90. Bellas, Marcia. 1999. ‘Emotional Labor in Academia: The Case of Professors’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 561(1): 96–110. Berg, Mette Louise and David Mills. 2010. ‘Gender, Disembodiment and Vocation: Exploring the Unmentionables of British Academic Life’, Critique of Anthropology 30(4): 331–53. Britton, Paul. 2020. ‘Law Firm Says Locked-down Manchester Students “May Be Entitled to Claim Damages for False Imprisonment”’, Manchester Evening News, 29 September. Clare, Ross. 2020. ‘How Working-Class Academics Are Set Up to Fail’. Tribune website. Retrieved 25 February 2022 from https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/10/ how-working-class-academics-are-set-up-to-fail. Collini, Stefan. 2012. What are Universities For? London: Penguin Books. Drayton, Elain and Ben Waltman. 2020. ‘Will Universities Need a Bailout to Survive the COVID-19 crisis?’, Briefing Note. Institute for Fiscal Studies. Retrieved 25 February 2022 from https://ifs.org.uk/publications/14919. Evans, Geoffrey and Jonathan Mellon. 2016. ‘Social Class: Identity, Awareness and Political Attitudes: Why are we still Working Class?’, British Social Attitudes (33rd Edition) on Social Class. Retrieved 25 February 2022 from https://www. bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-33/social-class.aspx. Fechter, Anne Meike. 2016. ‘Aid Work as Moral Labour’, Critique of Anthropology 36(3): 228–43. Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The Anthropological Career in Europe: A Complete Report on the EASA Membership Survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists, https://doi.org/10.22582/ easaprecanthro. Freire, Paulo. 2017. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin Books. Gill, Rosalind and Andy Pratt. 2008. ‘Precarity and Cultural Work in the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work’, Theory, Culture & Society 25(7–8): 1–30. Graeber, David. 2014. ‘Anthropology and the Rise of the Professional-Managerial Class’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(3): 73–88. Hardt, Michael. 1999. ‘Affective Labor’, Boundary 26(2): 89–100. Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ivancheva, Mariya. 2020. ‘The Casualization, Digitalization, and Outsourcing of Academic Labour: a Wake-up Call for Trade Unions’, FocaalBlog, 20 March. Retrieved 25 February 2022 from http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/03/20/ mariya-ivancheva-the-casualization-digitalization-and-outsourcing-ofacademic-labour-a-wake-up-call-for-trade-unions/.

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Ivancheva, Mariya, Kathleen Lynch and Kathryn Keating. 2019. ‘Precarity, Gender and Care in the Neoliberal Academy’, Gender, Work and Organization 26(4): 448–62. Kalb, Don. 2021. ‘Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t’, FocaalBlog, 27 January. Retrieved 25 February 2022 from http://www.focaalblog. com/2021/01/. Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Leighton, Mary. 2020. ‘Myths of Meritocracy, Friendship, and Fun Work: Class and Gender in North American Academic Communities’, American Anthropologist 122(3): 444–58. Macintyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. McGettigan, Andrew. 2020. Scoping Report for Union Branches, University of Sussex. Sussex UCU., Retrieved 22 March 2022 from https://b3cc34ed-4a8c-45c5-8584dc377a673e22.usrfiles.com/ugd/b3cc34_2939fee1b73b4f6cae4171f029b6e8a8. pdf. Mill, John Stewart. 2006. On Liberty and the Subjection of Women. London: Penguin Books. Mitchell, Jon. 2016. ‘Let our Profs be Profs’, ANUAC – Rivista dell’Associazione Nazionale Universitaria Antropologi Culturali 5(1): 87–90. Polanyi, Karl, 2002. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. London: Routledge. Rickett, Bridgette and Anna Morris. 2020. ‘Mopping up Tears in the Academy: Working-class Academics, Belonging, and the Necessity for Emotional Labour in UK Academia’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 42(1): 1–15. Shore, Chris and Miri Davidson. 2014. ‘Beyond Collusion and Resistance: Academic-Management Relations within the Neoliberal University’, Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences 7(1): 12–28. Shue, Henry. 1988. ‘Mediating Duties’, Ethics 98(4): 687–704. Strathern, Marilyn. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge. Toynbee, Polly. 2018. ‘The NHS is Our Religion: It’s the Only Thing That Saves It from the Tories’, The Guardian, 3 July. Retrieved 25 February 2022 from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/03/ nhs-religion-tories-health-service. University and College Union (UCU). 2016. ‘Precarious Work in Higher Education: a Snapshot of Insecure Contracts and Institutional Attitudes’. UCU website. Retrieved 25 February 2022 from https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/7995/ Precarious-work-in-higher-education-a-snapshot-of-insecure-contracts-andinstitutional-attitudes-Apr-16/pdf/ucu_precariouscontract_hereport_apr16. pdf. University and College Union (UCU). 2019. ‘Counting the Costs of Casualisation in Higher Education.’ UCU Website. Retrieved 29 March 2022 from https:// www.ucu.org.uk/media/10336/Counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-

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higher-education-Jun-19/pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_HE_survey_report_ Jun19.pdf. von Humboldt, Wilhelm. 2009. The Limits of State Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.   2004. The Vocation Lectures: ‘Science as a Vocation’; ‘Politics as a Vocation’. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.

Chapter 7

Dilemmas of Sexuality in Malta Reconciling Catholic and LGBTQ+ Identities Jon P. Mitchell

Introduction

I

first conducted fieldwork in Malta in the early 1990s, living in the ‘lower’ part of its capital Valletta – which at the time was both ‘lower’ topographically and ‘lower’ socially. I worked primarily with men associated with planning and performing the annual feast of St Paul – Festa San Pawl – which is the festa not only of the local parish saint but also of the national patron of Malta (see Mitchell 2002). My interlocutors were fervent followers of St Paul, and devout Catholics. Their lives revolved around the Church – not only as an institution but also as a place of everyday sociality. When not at work they would spend their time between the church sacristy, the clubhouse of the Association of Paulites (the Għaqda tal-Pawlini), a nearby workshop where the paraphernalia of the festa were held,1 and a small café/bar that was an unofficial Pawlini clubhouse. I was interested in the festa as ritual, and ritual as a generative and performative act (Mitchell 2006), and it became clear to me that there were important processes of gender performativity embedded in the practices of festa (Mitchell 1998). My chief interlocutors were very preoccupied with the choice of appropriate men to carry the monumental statue of St Paul during the festa procession – the culmination and climax of the several days’ festivities. The statue is heavy, so requires physical strength but also the moral qualities of being a ‘good man’ – raġel sew. Such men are reliable and trustworthy, with a strong devotion; publicly

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sociable but not excessively so; committed to their family, the Church and the Għaqda tal-Pawlini. As a model of a style of hegemonic masculinity, raġel sew is strongly heteronormative. Sexuality in 1990s Malta was dominated by Catholic morality – within which same-sex sexual activity is sinful. Although legal since 1973 it was largely hidden, and everyday conversation among groups of men often revolved around rumours and speculation about men who might regularly have sex with men, who were labelled with the pejorative term pufta (pl. pufti). Pufti were seen as unreliable, crafty, even dangerous to be with – fear of male same-sex sexuality is a prevalent trope of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995; Vale de Almeida 1996; Baldacchino 2019). During fieldwork, to escape from the socially rather claustrophobic Valletta environment I would periodically take long walks outside the city, and around the then largely deserted ramparts and battlements of the extended fortifications surrounding the city and its harbour neighbours. On one occasion when returning to the city from an expedition, I passed an area of brushland that I had heard was a site where men went for casual sexual encounters with other men. Standing close to a bush was a man I recognized from Valletta – not an Għaqda tal-Pawlini member, but part of the wider social circle of men who congregated in and around the ‘clubhouse’ bar. I was curious, given the emphasis on heteronormative raġel sew, that this man was to my knowledge not ‘marked’ as pufta nor regarded with particular suspicion. Surely if I had seen him hanging out in this place, then others must also know that he had sex with men? When I got back to Valletta I asked about this, and my interlocutors replied in a way that suggested they were less interested in other men’s sexual morality than I had assumed – that it was their business, and they knew what they had to do if they sinned: confess. My puzzlement, I now realize, came from a particular (mis)understanding of ethical regimes, in which I had presumed people maintain absolute consistency in the ethical and moral judgements they make about people’s actions and identities. I was deeply impressed by my interlocutors’ commitment to Church and religion, and their commitment to the moral imperative of being raġel sew. I had therefore presumed their morality was more of an integrated and hermetic system – a moral community or ethical regime in which the boundaries of acceptable behaviour were rigorously protected, and transgression not tolerated. The apparent pragmatism and tacit acceptance of differences of sexuality raised a question to which I have not returned until now. At the time of my fieldwork there was little, if any, sustained academic research on sexuality in Malta – as in Maltese society more broadly

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the topic was largely taboo. Cole (1994) broached the issue, but only really to confirm its marginalization. For her ‘gay men and lesbians’ were ‘outsiders’ – ‘practically invisible to Maltese society’ (1994: 598), and so also practically invisible to Maltese scholarship. In the nearly thirty years since Cole’s piece, and my initial fieldwork in Malta, LGBTQ+ Maltese have become more visible and more politically active, and have accrued more rights. Indeed, in legislative terms, Malta is one of the more LGBTQ+-friendly nations in the world – with rights defended in the constitution, it ranks number 1 on the rainbow-europe.org country ranking (rainbow-europe.org/country-ranking). At the same time, scholarship by and about LGBTQ+ Maltese has gained momentum. This chapter draws on two recent Ph.D.’s by Maltese scholars (Borg 2015; Deguara 2018), who explore the moral dilemmas of LGBTQ+ Maltese as they navigate a pathway between sexuality, religion and morality. This work demonstrates the complex reflexivity involved as people seek to locate themselves as LGBTQ+ within a Catholic moral universe. To this extent it builds on work in the anthropology of religion that has increasingly foregrounded the active role of subjectivity in the constitution of religious – and moral – worlds; but it also points towards contexts in which such worlds are fraught with contradictions and dilemmas, challenging visions of consistency or order that characterized earlier approaches to religion and morality within anthropology – and which initially characterized mine in Malta.

Anthropology, Crisis, Reflexivity Anthropologists are renowned for their perpetual lamentation that the discipline is in crisis (Grimshaw and Hart 1994: 227; see also Baldacchino this volume). We currently inhabit a discipline – and a world – that has seen the revitalization of what Jebens (2010) described as a ‘third phase’ of anthropological crisis, brought about by the challenges to anthropological legitimacy associated with the crisis of representation of the 1980s and 1990s – and as exemplified by Clifford and Marcus (1986). This crisis has been (re)galvanized in the 2020s by calls for a decolonization of the discipline and the (re)habilitation of plural voices within anthropology (Chua and Mathur 2018; Mogstad and Tse 2018). I will pick up on some of the implications of these more recent developments at the end of the chapter, but for now I will focus on the extent to which these critiques led to an increased and more explicit reflexivity among anthropologists. Framed as an impetus to acknowledge the anthropologist’s positionality as a factor in the production of

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ethnographic knowledge, it led anthropologists who had longer-term engagement with particular field contexts to revisit their fieldwork and reflect on their earlier assumptions. For example, in the early to mid-2000s, Paul Clough began to reflect upon his fieldwork in the Hausa village of Marmara, northern Nigeria, where he had worked in the 1970s (Clough 2006). In particular, he began to reflect on assumptions he had made about religion and morality. His main focus was rural political economy and his fieldwork was informed by the Marxist analysis he had learned in sociology at Oxford, where he had trained. He had, however, framed his understanding of Marmara religion through the lens of his own Catholic upbringing. He had difficulty reconciling his Catholicism with his Marxism, he tells us, and struggled to realize the promise of reassurance his faith had offered him in his own life. Through his Ph.D. and subsequent book, Clough developed a new theory of agrarian accumulation (Clough 2014) but was also drawn towards the contemplative introspection of his village interlocutors and their preoccupation with questions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (see also Clough and Mitchell 2002). The Marmara Hausa were Muslims and, as in my own work in Malta – and although Clough did not explicitly frame it this way – were particularly concerned with discerning ‘good’ and ‘bad’ masculinity: a Nigerian analogue of raġel sew. He noted men’s prone-ness to moral self-reflection and tendency to evaluate actions in terms of their faithfulness to moral obligation or compulsion – in Hausa, the properties of gara, or dole (Clough 2006: 270). Economic actions, and particularly economic successes, were compared in terms of hali – the ‘character, temperament, disposition’ under which they had been undertaken, which could be good (kyan) or bad (mugun). Whilst goodness and badness were properties of acts and persons, Marmara Muslims maintained a strong sense of fatalistic destiny: ‘the power of God decreed the success or failure, life and death of every person’ (2006: 272). For Clough this fatalism contrasted with what he understood as Catholic notions of free will, in which humans have the capacity – through thought and deed – to influence their futures, in both this world and the next. In the context of this fatalism he sought to find a sense of agency within the structure of Hausa Islam and found it, above all, in moral evaluations of actions towards others: My experience of the Hausa language was that people reserved their highest approval for those who undertook hidima. Dictionaries translate this simply as ‘serving a person’ (Abraham) or ‘service, administration’ (Robinson). But in Marmara, it seemed to have the special connotation of ‘responsibility’ and

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was used of a range of particular responsibilities – especially the responsibility to provide oneself and one’s children with marriage partners. (Clough 2006: 271)

The Hausa of Marmara had been relatively recent converts to Islam and maintained with that – by Clough’s reckoning – the relative zeal of the convert. Despite obvious differences in wealth and position they regarded themselves, in his account, as (part of) a new community with a collective commitment to Islam and its ritual requirements. They were repentant and were part of the broader jema’a, or People of God – subject to God’s will. Reflecting on both his fieldwork and on the ways in which he presented his fieldwork in his Ph.D. thesis, Clough was struck by the extent to which his writing constituted Marmara as a moral community: Society as Church. Uncomfortable with his own Catholicism, Clough felt that he had found – or built – the House of God in Marmara because of the difficulty he had with finding God in his own. The image he portrayed of Marmara was one of a unified and homogeneous moral community, matching his image of what an ideal Catholic community should constitute; he points towards the language he used in his doctoral thesis, in presenting this community as an analogue of Catholicism: Textual analysis reveals a form of writing which is not as transparent as it seemed to me at the time. Notice the claim to ethnographic authority, rather than the disclosure of assumptions: ‘features...which were so compelling...’ Notice the cadence homogenising communal life: ‘all men...all adults...all boys.’ There is the hushed sense of a mystical life: ‘...special gatherings, very strange...’ Key descriptive passages come from the lexicon of Catholicism: ‘beseech God...the power of intercession through prayer.’ And these various devices culminate in the statement of a unity which transcends the divisions of a commoditised society: ‘cemented people’s...membership of...the People of God’. (Clough 2006: 275)

The resultant text builds an image of Marmara religious morality as a homogeneous and integrated system that is applied consistently by all members of the community. Clough would no doubt also have been puzzled had he observed, as I had done, apparent anomalies or inconsistencies. Clough was not explicitly researching religion – just as I was not explicitly researching sexuality – and refers to his observations about religion and morality as ‘knowledge in passing’. Yet it formed an important part of his ethnographic analysis. What is more – and because it was not directly derived from his empirical economic data – it was retrospectively constructed, from reminiscence and reflection, between

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the time of his fieldwork in the 1970s and the completion of his thesis in the 1990s. In Cohen’s terms it was ‘post-fieldwork fieldwork’ (Cohen 1992) – a reinterpretation of fieldwork experience based upon changes in the ethnographer’s preoccupations or perspectives that had occurred since fieldwork. Cohen builds upon Ottenberg’s (1990) distinction between ‘fieldnotes’ and ‘headnotes’ to elaborate. The former are based on the record of everyday encounters and events that ethnographers collect during fieldwork; the latter are the ethnographer’s sense of how those encounters and events ‘make sense’ or fit together into a larger picture. The problem with such headnotes, and particularly when they are reconstructed via ‘knowledge in passing’, is that they tend towards a kind of gestalt that asserts an order or systematicity that is (or was) not actually present in social life. Inasmuch as headnotes constitute a process of ordering, they tend towards a vision of ordered life – and so of ordered, integrated and consistent moral systems.

Religion, Morality, Subjectivity In invoking the image of ‘society as Church’ (Clough 2006: 274), Clough is also hinting at a Durkheimian reading of religion. For Durkheim, religion was: a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. (Durkheim 1966: 47)

Religion was a marker of social unity and generator of social solidarity, as it both reflected and constituted the social. Indeed, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim emphasizes that ‘the general conclusion of the book which the reader has before him is that religion is something eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities’ (1966: 22). Although his was an avowedly secular theory of religion that related – even reduced – religion to social relations, Durkheim shared with Weber (that other foundational thinker for the Anthropology of Religion) a pessimism about secularism. For Weber secularist disenchantment risks meaninglessness (Weber 1948: 139ff.), whilst for Durkheim it risks social disintegration and anomie. Thus, although the foundations of the Anthropology of Religion were secular, as was most of its development in and through the twentieth century, there was nevertheless a residual regard or nostalgia for religion

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as a source of social and moral cohesion. As Latour argues, the modernist constitution – of which anthropology is a part – only ever ‘crosses out’ God (Latour 1993: 32ff.). Indeed, God cast a long shadow over twentieth century social anthropology – particularly at the Oxford Institute under Evans-Pritchard, who was one of a number of prominent anthropologists – including Godfrey Lienhardt, and later David Pocock and Victor Turner – who converted to Catholicism (Larsen 2014; Engelke 2002). I am not sure of the extent, if any, of Paul Clough’s connection to Oxford social anthropologists – he was trained in rural sociology – but it is interesting that he shared a faith with a number of them, albeit in his case a lapsed one. Well versed in Marxist theory he would doubtless have drawn criticism from EvansPritchard, who was scathing of the evolutionism and secularism of the nineteenth-century theorists – not only Marx, but also Tylor, Frazer and Durkheim (Larsen 2014: 95). His Catholic students, though – Pocock and Mary Douglas (who was Catholic from birth) – recognized in Durkheim an important theory of moral order, and retained an interest in morality throughout their anthropology careers. It was another of EvansPritchard’s students, though, who was to pave the way for the recent ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology. Talal Asad trained under Evans-Pritchard in the 1960s. His ethnographic work was in northern Sudan (Asad 1970) but he is better known for his historical and theoretical work on religion, and particularly Christianity and Islam (Asad 1986; 1993). His work is concerned not so much with critiquing the secularity of anthropological theory as with unpicking the underlying categories through which an anthropology of religion – and indeed all Enlightenment or modernist thought – operates, including the very categories of ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ themselves. This preoccupation first emerged in his critique of Geertz’s account of religion as a cultural system (Asad 1983), which was itself a critique of British functionalist theories. For Geertz, religion could not be reduced to the social but operates rather as an autonomous, ideational system of symbols and meanings that generate a particular vision of the world – a model of the world – and a blueprint for moral action within it – a model for the world (Geertz 1973: 94). Religion’s effectiveness derives from its ability to bring these together to formulate ‘a basic congruence between a particular style of life … [model for] … and a specific (if, most often, implicit) metaphysic … [model of] … and in so doing sustain each other with the borrowed authority of the other’ (1973: 90). Asad (1983; 1993) was critical of the circularity of Geertz’s argument, in which the symbols and meanings of religion – and its models of

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and for – appear to have no source other than themselves. Building on Foucault’s genealogical approach, Asad argues that such systematicity as religious ideas have is not derived from the symbols and meanings themselves but from the discursive conditions within which symbols and meanings come to be meaningful. He figures religions as discursive traditions, and so the anthropology of religion as a practice that pays attention to ‘the conditions … [in which] … symbols come to be constructed, and how some of them are established as natural or authoritative as opposed to others’ (Asad 1993: 31). What qualifies as ‘religious’ is subject to the ebb and flow of discursive power, including that of secular social science. His analysis of Christianity and Islam sees them as traditions in which beliefs, practices and moralities are not fixed but the subject of constant debate and discussion, at the centre of which are practices of discipline and subjectivation. The very possibility of religious practices and utterances, and their authoritative status, are to be explained as products of ‘historically distinctive disciplines and forces’ (1993: 54), which create the precondition for moral activity in the world in that they frame not only the content of moral activity – what is right and what is wrong – but more fundamentally the very notion of morality itself, which has a distinct history in each different religious tradition. It is to the anthropology of Islam that Asad has made his main contribution, suggesting that we might view it as itself an historical and ongoing discursive practice within which lines of orthodoxy and orthopraxy are established, and subjects incorporate – literally, though the body – appropriate modes of conduct linked to visions of right and wrong: My concern is with the way the living body subjectifies itself through images, practices, institutions, programs, objects – and through other living bodies … I take the grammar of authority (authoritative discourse) to be rooted in continuously interacting materialities – the body’s internal and external constitution, and the energies that sustain them – that make for its compelling character. It is not signs in themselves that explain people’s recognition of authority; it is how people have learned to do, feel, and remember signs that helps explain it. Or (in another key) how they apprehend signs of the beloved when they ‘fall in love’. (Asad 2006: 214)

Asad directly influenced a generation of scholars for whom the turn to the discursive was also a turn to the ethical (see Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood 2004; Scott and Hirschkind 2006). Through disciplining processes of subjectivation, religious people – and here we are looking mainly at Muslims – constitute or cultivate themselves as ethical subjects. Through Asad and those influenced by him we were given a way

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of understanding how persons live through religion, or religion lives through persons – through their subjectivation to religious discourse, not as a passive but as an active process – and how we might account for agency among fatalistic Hausa traders, for example. Perhaps the best-known development of this argument came in Saba Mahmood’s (2001; 2004) account of a pietist women’s mosque movement in Cairo. In this movement women from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds provide lessons to each other that focus on the teaching and studying of Islamic scriptures, social practices and forms of bodily comportment considered germane to the cultivation of the ideal, virtuous self. The pious subjects of this movement – in which non-liberal ideas of selfhood, moral agency and discipline were undergirding principles – posed a challenge for Mahmood, as a North Americaneducated feminist scholar (2001). Rather than seeking empowerment and autonomy as women, which is a goal of feminist thought, they appeared to pursue practices and ideals embedded within a tradition that historically accorded women a subordinate status, and to seek to cultivate virtues that are associated with feminine passivity and submissiveness – shyness, modesty, perseverance and humility. How, then, to understand their agency? Mahmood argues that we should reconceptualize power as a set of relations that do not simply dominate the subject but that also form the conditions of possibility for subjectivity. In this way, women pursuing and cultivating apparently repressive subjectivity can itself be seen as a process of emancipation and empowerment. Mahmood compares the process to virtuoso pianists who subject themselves to the discipline and structure of practice in order to better liberate themselves (2001: 210); thus signalling the practical ways in which individuals work upon themselves to become willing subjects of an authoritative discourse. The pursuit of piety entailed the inculcation of entire dispositions through a simultaneous training of the body, emotions and reason – as sites of discipline – until religious virtues acquired the status of embodied habits. Mahmood describes her interlocutor–friends Amal and Nama discussing the cultivation of shyness and bodily orientation to veiling: Amal said ‘I used to think that even though shyness (al-haya’) was required of us by God, if I acted shyly it would be hypocritical (nifaq) because I didn’t actually feel it inside of me. Then one day … I realized that al-haya’ was among the good deeds (huwwa min al-a’mal al-saliha) and given my natural lack of al-haya’ I had to make or create it first. I realized that making (sana’) it in yourself is not hypocrisy (nifaq), and that eventually your inside learns to have al-haya’ too.’ Here she looked at me and explained the meaning of the word istihya’: ‘It means making oneself shy, even if it means creating it …

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the sense of shyness (al-haya’) eventually imprints itself on your inside’ … Nama, a single woman in her early thirties … added: ‘It’s just like the veil (hijab). In the beginning when you wear it, you’re embarrassed (maksofa) … But you must wear the veil, first because it is God’s command (hukm Allah), and then, with time, your inside learns to feel shy without the veil, and if you were to take it off your entire being feels uncomfortable (mish radi) about it.’ (Mahmood 2001: 213)

Through Mahmood and others inspired by Asad, Islam – and, by extension, other religions – became increasingly recast as a project of ethical self-fashioning and the pursuit of moral subjectivity. Critics, though, pointed towards the relative exceptionality of movements such as the one examined by Mahmood, which in its conservatism emphasizes conformity and subjection. So, although Mahmood accounts for autonomous agency (albeit in the context of self-disciplining) the effect is to reproduce a vision of religious community as relatively homogeneous, with a high degree of moral consistency. Instead, these critics focus on more mundane and everyday forms of religiosity – and ethics – among lessconservative Muslims, for whom the religious life presents a constant series of dilemmas (Marsden 2005; Osella and Soares 2020). For example, Schielke (2009) examines – among other things – the moral implications of young men’s lateral participation in Ramadan, in a northern Egyptian village. Here, Ramadan is not only a time of pious obligation – of prayer and fasting – but also, for young men, a time for football. Football kills time before fast-breaking, concentrating the mind and body on game and tactics rather than hunger and thirst. It also enables sociality and amusement – and a substitute or compensation for the young men during Ramadan not being able to chase women, smoke marijuana and drink beer, which are their normal pastimes. Ramadan football, then, is an ambivalent activity – but so is Islam as a whole, argues Schielke: Daily life … continues to be characterised by the ambiguity between and an uneasy co-existence of religious morality and discipline, communal respect and reputation, the expectations and promises of consumerism and romantic love, and the limitations of practical circumstances. (Schielke 2009: S25)

Schielke sees the Asad-inspired accounts of religious morality as approaching it too strongly from the perspective of coherence and consistency. Religious discourses appear to present a coherent plan of subjectivation through which a virtuous self can be cultivated. Virtue, he argues, is not nearly so clear and unambiguous. Rather, everyday religion – and everyday ethics – present dilemmas and ambivalences

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not only between moral and amoral (or immoral) aims but also between different, and at times mutually hostile, moral aims.

Being Gay in Malta It is with this in mind that I return to Malta and the work of Angele Deguara (2018; 2020) and Jonathan Borg (2015), who both examine the lives and moral dilemmas of Maltese Catholics who are also LGBTQ+. Such dilemmas often present themselves as the product of competing secular and religious moralities, but they are not straightforwardly generated by a ‘clash’ of moral regimes – rather the attempt to navigate the contradictions of everyday moralities. They constitute an effort to negotiate the contradictions of Catholic understandings of the moral person: between obligation and free will, and between theological principle and human practice. Moreover, these efforts point towards the intercalation or articulation of different moral registers in contemporary Maltese sexuality – legal, secular, religious and what one might call ‘traditional’ or ‘social’. As I intimated above, and as Deguara points out, Malta is de jure extremely liberal with regard to sexuality – with a strong commitment to the rights of LGBTQ+ Maltese and the good lives that these rights can deliver. If the legislative protection of such rights and goods can be seen as a legacy of process put in motion by the European Enlightenment, then Malta’s advanced status perhaps confirms the claims made by the architects of most of this legislation – the Malta Labour Party and its now-disgraced Prime Minister Joseph Muscat2 – that Malta is the most European of European nation states. Again, if Europeanization equates to secularization then the expansion of LGBTQ+ rights might be seen as a marker of increased secularity as against more ‘traditional’ Catholic ideas about sexual morality. Despite this, however, Maltese social life – in distinction from its legal life – maintains a strong de facto heteronormativity that militates against the free expression of LGBTQ+ sexualities, and is at least partially rooted in Church teachings. The Church’s official position is that LGBTQ+ identities are in essence not sinful – and indeed can be regarded as a natural orientation or tendency – but that sexual activities associated with LGBTQ+ sexualities can be. Speaking in 2019 in Spain Pope Francis rather gnomically compared homosexuality to anger: although we might in our personalities have a tendency towards anger, this is not in itself sinful unless we act upon that anger to hurt people. Similarly, a tendency towards homosexuality is not in itself sinful – what is sinful is a same-sex act (San Martin 2019).

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Such acts are regarded by the Church as ‘“essentially self indulgent” and immoral’ (Deguara 2018: 6) because they do not take place in the context of producing life. This position would seem to tally with my Valletta interlocutors’ attitude towards the man in their midst who was known to occasionally have sex with men in the brushland outside Valletta. The act was sinful, but in and of itself required no more than a confrontation with the conscience, confession and absolution. The tendency, meanwhile, was not a problem in itself. This framing of LGBTQ+ identities and practices reveals a tension between ideas of human essence or nature, and free will – presenting same-sex activity as a choice – and a sinful one at that – rather than part of a process of self-realization. To this extent it presents a paradox or double-bind analogous to that discussed by Fernando (2010) in relation to veiling in Paris. Here, Muslim advocates of veiling are required to present it as a matter of choice to avoid accusations of forcing women to veil; yet at the same time they are required to argue that it is not a choice but an obligation, in order to counter the claim that if it is a choice it can’t be fundamental to Islam. In this case if LGBTQ+ sexuality is a matter of choice, or free will, then it can’t be fundamental to LGBTQ+ identity, so that people who are LGBTQ+ by natural orientation or tendency are constantly confronted with the sinfulness of their attempts to realize this orientation and the social opprobrium of community, family, neighbourhood that this brings. For despite the strength of LGBTQ+ rights, in the legal/secular frame, and despite the apparent laissez-faire approach of seeing same-sex sex as sinful but atoneable through confession – in the theological/religious frame – there is nevertheless still a strong ‘traditional’ or ‘social’ opposition to LGBTQ+ identities. This is manifest in the kind of preoccupation highlighted above, of identifying (and vilifying) so-called pufti among male friendship groups, but also in the stultifying social stigma – and associated feelings of guilt, shame, or disgrace (in Maltese, għarukaża or mistħija)3 surrounding LGBTQ+ Maltese and their families. Deguara’s thesis (2018) explores the lives of Maltese who regard themselves as Catholic but are nevertheless living ‘in sin’ – both LGBTQ+ Maltese and non-LGBTQ+ who live together as unmarried couples. She argues that whilst the latter experience forms of public shame, based on the need to adjust social-friendship groups and endure familial disapproval, for the former such shame is a secondary emotion. The moral lives of most LGBTQ+ Maltese, she argued, are dominated by guilt caused by the dissonance that emerges from their internalization of Catholic morality whilst at the same time being conscious of their emerging LGBTQ+ sexuality (2018: 160). At the centre of this problem is the question of

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how to live a sexually fulfilled ‘good’ life – realizing themselves in their essence, identity or ‘tendency’ (to use the Church’s term) – whilst at the same time maintaining their Catholicism. Guilt is a personal anguish born of an existential dissonance and concern for one’s relationship with God in a context that requires a disciplining of sexuality and subjectification to the framework of identifying sin. The contrast between guilt and shame is illustrated in Borg’s thesis (2015) by the story of Nick. Borg’s work explores the lives of self-identified gay male teachers in Malta, through their personal narratives of struggle in relation to their sexuality and both the heteronormativity and dominant Catholicism of the Maltese education system. Nick had had a difficult childhood, not because of his sexuality but because of significant learning difficulties. He had sought refuge in the Church, becoming a festa aficionado who sought refuge and security in religious morality (2015: 160). He had, however, observed another boy at school, who was identified as pufta, being mercilessly bullied, and over time began to realize that the empathy he felt for this boy was rooted in a shared sexuality. By his late teens he realized he was gay, and with that his relationship to Church and religion changed from one of protective reassurance to condemnation and guilt. In his early twenties Nick had his first samesex encounter, which prompted him to begin the process of coming out to his family. Until that point he had been terrified about his parents finding out about his sexuality, but received warm reassurance from his elder brother and, subsequently, his father, whom his brother told. His mother’s response was more problematic, and led to something of a breakdown as she lamented Nick’s ‘abnormality’ and sinfulness – and worried about his salvation (166). The concern, however, was equally about public shame: how would she tell her sisters and father; how could she confront neighbours and fellow parishioners? To avoid this shame, the family’s participation in festa was curtailed: ‘It seemed as if there was nothing to celebrate’ (152). Deguara introduces us to Henry, who at the time of her research was 42 and cohabiting in a same-sex relationship. Henry ‘came out’ when he was 40, but his relationship with the Church in his sexuality was an enduring and constant source of deep anxiety and periodic depression. He had had a relatively strict Catholic upbringing, in which talk of sexuality – and even of the body – were strongly taboo (Deguara 2018: 164). Henry knew he was gay from when he was around 20 but conformed strictly to the Church’s teaching, and even tried to find solace through membership of religious institutions despite their being the source of his internal conflict. He had been an altar boy when he was young, and went on to join a religious order despite having no real vocation.

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He later immersed himself in the Neocatechumenal Way – a somewhat controversial, conservative movement within the Catholic Church that emphasizes catechistic renewal through small, parish-based communities inspired by the early Church’s missionary and conversion activities. Henry described joining The Way as the ‘worst mistake’ of his life (2018: 164). He prayed to God to ‘heal’ him – other LGBTQ+ Maltese described by Deguara had prayed for God to ‘take’ them (161) – and was forced to deny his sexuality. Leaders of The Way attempted to valorize his inner contradiction – calling his sexuality ‘his cross to bear’ (164). He was encouraged to date women but, like his earlier non-vocation, this merely compounded his sense of guilt because he was being untruthful both to himself and to the women he dated (164). The contradiction led to a wild behavioural oscillation. He started watching gay porn, drinking heavily and having casual sex with men he met in gay bars. He soon became depressed and returned to The Way, where he was told he was weak, had been manipulated by men for sex and was incapable of love (165). The internalization of such messages, a recurrent theme in both Deguara’s and Borg’s ethnography, leads LGBTQ+ Maltese to see themselves as essentially selfish, bad or even evil. Borg introduces us to Manuel, who at the time of writing was a post-secondary teacher who was involved in support work for LGBTQ+ students but also struggled with the heteronormativity of Maltese education, and broader society, as it impacted upon him in his daily life. Like Henry, Manuel had a devoutly Catholic upbringing – receiving daily mass at the local convent; attending Church school; and taking doctrine lessons provided by MUSEUM, the lay Society of Christian Doctrine. MUSEUM was established in the early twentieth century by Dun Ġorġ Preca (now St Ġorġ Preca)4 to provide doctrinal education to young Maltese. MUSEUM teachers – both men and women – take vows of celibacy, maintain modest or plain dress and are known locally as tal-Mużew (‘of MUSEUM’) (Borg 2015: 189). Manuel was attracted to other boys from a relatively early age – having kissed a boy at age 8 and developed crushes in his teens, one of which had led to kissing and touching on a sleepover (2015: 191). He says that from the earliest encounter he ‘realized’ that this same-sex activity was ‘wrong’ and made him feel incredibly guilty. He tells how in his later teens this guilt was confirmed through his interpellation (Althusser 1970) by a Church sermon. By this time Manuel had worked his way through the ranks of the MUSEUM students, and was being asked by its leadership to himself take on classes. He gave absolute authority to Biblical teaching and Church doctrine, in which ‘homosexuality [was] an objective disorder … unnatural … [and] … an intrinsically grievous sin’

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(Borg 2015: 191). Yet he continued to be torn by the reality of his sexuality – and, like Henry, was haunted both by the fear of his sexuality being revealed and by the guilt of living a double life. One Sunday morning, Manuel attended early mass, at which the priest’s homily centred on a passage from the Book of Timothy in which ‘neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals’ would inherit the Kingdom of God (Timothy 1:9–10). Althusser (1970) describes the process of ideological subjectivation – the internalization of dominant ideology – as a form of interpellation or ‘hailing’, in which the subject is called upon to conform to the appellant’s requirements of appropriate conduct. Manuel felt that on this otherwise sleepy Sunday morning the priest was directly addressing him, and calling him out for his sexuality: Although [Manuel] had never confessed this inner confusion to a priest or a spiritual director, it felt as though the priest was being accusatory in his gaze and that made him feel culpable. His heart throbbed and cold sweat wetted his forehead with undefeatable paranoia. ‘Certainly, it was me whom the priest was referring to. He could not possibly be addressing the rest of the faithful. How could he ever get to know about me? Had someone doubted my masculinity and spoke to the priest about it? Have I been feminine in any way? Was it the parents from il-Mużew? (MUSEUM)’ Manuel kept thinking of the various possibilities but could not come to any conclusion. (Borg 2015: 192)

Becoming tal-Mużew had enabled Manuel to hide behind its rules of celibacy, which both protected him from awkward questions about why a young man was not considering marriage to a woman and at the same time met the official Church sanction against same-sex activity regardless of one’s ‘tendency’. But he felt morally torn by his sense that this was a dishonest solution, and that whilst he taught young people about the immorality of same-sex sex he himself saw himself as gay. At the same time, whilst he realized it would be more honest to leave MUSEUM, realize his identity and cultivate a sexually good life, he was nevertheless afraid of the threat of eternal damnation that this sinful life may bring (Borg 2015: 201). Like Henry’s, his life was characterized by ongoing anxiety and periods of depression as he tried to negotiate this moral impasse. As Deguara and Borg narrate it both Henry and Manuel began to find resolution in their contradictory and guilt-filled moral and sexual lives. Henry left The Neocatechumenal Way for a second time but, instead of embarking on another hedonistic spree, found community in a Maltese organization called Drachma LGBTI. This was established in 2004 as an organization to promote and provide integration between sexuality and

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spirituality. It holds meetings and events to provide space for discussion of – and manifestation of – a spiritual conciliation of Catholicism and LGBTQ+ sexualities. He felt rejected by the Church but still yearned for inclusion, and still often ponders a return to The Way (Deguara 2018: 113). Manuel left MUSEUM, which left him feeling slightly exposed – particularly in the heteronormative environment of Maltese education. He arrived at this decision through reflection and spiritual exercises, and critical deconstruction of both his faith and his sexuality: With the help of spiritual exercises I started reflecting about the decision I had taken about my faith, my life, il-Mużew … and this made me more critical but safe. I started realising that it is normal and safe to question faith with a capital ‘F’. I started becoming critical in a constructivist way and applied deconstructionism to my own faith and to my own perspectives about life and sexuality … I no longer say that if the Church said so then it’s [a] hundred per cent right and it shall not be questioned. I am not going to be apologetic towards the Church. Today I am still a Catholic. I am a devout Catholic. But I am critical … I challenge the traditional doctrine about homosexuality and the natural law. (Borg 2015: 194)

Conclusion – Undisciplined Faith? LGBTQ+ Maltese, who are predominantly brought up within the Catholic faith,5 reconcile the moral dilemma of Church visions of good and evil with the wish to realize the self and cultivate a (sexually) good life, through a shift in their understanding of God and their relationship with God. In effect they separate God from Church, and from the authoritative discourse and power of moral condemnation, towards a new moral position of realizing the self in and through their sexual nature, or ‘tendencies’. Their vision of God is transformed from being a source of authority and judgement – which leads to self-loathing, guilt, fear and desperation – towards a God seen as an embodiment and source of unconditional love. This shift provides solace that, unlike the Church, God will not judge them – and as a consequence there is release from the disciplining Catholic morality that requires a denial of essence, or nature. This is not to say, though, that this shift is an absolute liberation from the disciplining forces of Church discourse. Much of the framework for the realization of LGBTQ+ selfhood is rooted in the assumption that a success in this project lies in the stable, monogamous household – and perhaps even same-sex marriage. This reveals and reproduces the hegemony of heteronormative kinship (Butler 2000; Carver and Chambers 2007) and

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the strength of the model of the nuclear family unit – itself a central pillar of the Church’s moral teaching. Clough does not tell us the reasons for his estrangement from Catholicism, though his Marxism was undoubtedly a factor. But his recognition that his work in Marmara had prompted him to constitute a vision of its Hausa Muslims’ religious morality as one that reproduced his own Catholic past mirrors the nostalgic pull-back towards the Church and its institutions that is clearly felt by a number of Deguara’s and Borg’s research participants. Clough chided himself for overstating the integration of Marmara Muslims’ moral world; for effectively ‘doing a Durkheim’ on them – and I chide him too, as I chide myself for having assumed that in their conservative devoutness my Valletta informants would have no place for a man who has sex with men. This homogenization, or generalization, of people’s lives is a persistent tendency within anthropological writing – and in my choice of examples from Deguara and Borg I might be accused of such homogenization, in that I chose to focus on men who have sex with men, whose moral anguish was somewhat resolved by a shift in their understanding of religion. I might have chosen others from the variety of LGBTQ+ Maltese that these two theses discuss. But I focused on these stories to show the ways in which people living in conservative religious environments experience the same kinds of moral dilemmas and contradictions that Schielke (2009) emphasizes in his Egyptian ethnography. He makes the point partly to demonstrate that there are forms of everyday or lived Islam that are not the same as the ultra-conservatism of Mahmood’s (2001) women’s prayer groups. My point is that even within such conservative contexts similar moral dilemmas exist, are experienced, managed and at least partially resolved as subjects attempt to realize themselves within and through contrasting moral orders. The current crisis in anthropological knowledge is framed with reference to a decolonizing agenda. Mogstad and Tse (2018) highlight the discipline’s history of ‘erasures, silences and misrecognitions’ (59), and argue not only that such silences be filled with a plurality of different voices but also that such voices come from places other than the metropolitan centres of anthropological knowledge production. In this last regard Malta is an interesting and interstitial place. Its anthropology is very much plugged into European and metropolitan anglophone networks, and yet it also has an enduring colonial and postcolonial history. The voices presented here, then – of Nick, Henry and Manuel, but also Borg and Deguara – do not come from the ‘Global South’ as such but have nevertheless, as ‘outsiders’ (Cole 1994), been erased, silenced and misrecognized.

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This chapter opened with one such misrecognition – in which I built a particular understanding of the moral and religious dimensions of masculinity and sexuality, based in part on the anthropological instinct to exert order on unruly field observations but also on my perception of the contrast between my devout Catholic interlocutors and my own liberal, lapsed, low-church upbringing. Like Clough in Marmara, I built a vision of Church not so much because of its absence in my life but because of my misapprehension of its presence in others’. With misrecognition comes silencing but my opening story revealed another mode of silencing, inherent in my Valletta interlocutors’ reluctance to cast moral judgement on their neighbour who had sex with men. Doing so would be to publicly acknowledge that although same-sex sex is sinful, the ‘tendency’ towards same-sex attraction is immutable – perhaps natural. This in turn would lend legitimacy to LGBTQ+ identities. As such, the apparent liberalism of a laissez-faire attitude – that men having sex with men is their business alone – conceals a conservatism that has the same protective logic as that of Nick’s mother, who was overcome by the shame of his coming out.6 The act, or even the tendency, is less problematic than its public exposure. Silencing, then, is both an ethnographic and an epistemological issue – and a decolonial anthropology needs to be aware of both the power structures within which it itself is embedded and those within which its research participants operate. Rendering silenced voices enables us to locate people’s moral lives within the context of ongoing dilemmas, challenges and contradictions. Indeed, it might require us to abandon a notion of moral system in favour of the everyday, lived conundrum of morality-in-crisis. Jon P. Mitchell is Professor and currently Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He has published several books and numerous articles on the anthropology of religion, politics and sport. His regional expertise is the Mediterranean and UK. He is a member of the editorial board of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Journal of Mediterranean Studies and Etnografica (Lisbon). His work has appeared in Social Analysis, Ethnos, Identities, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

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Notes  1. Festa involves both solemn liturgical events that take place within the church and lively celebrations outside. For the period of festa – a week of activities leading up to the feast day itself, 10 February – the streets of the parish are decorated with banners, statues and other street decorations. These are stored during the year in the Pawlini workshop, or maħzen.  2. Muscat was forced to resign to save the Labour government following the 2017 murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia and the emergence of accusations of government corruption in its wake (see Sant Cassia this volume).  3. For a more detailed account of Maltese ideas about shame, see Mitchell 2002: Chapter 3.  4. Ġorġ Preca was a Maltese priest. Dun is an honorific salutation, equivalent to the Italian Don. Preca was canonized in 2007 after medical miracles were attributed to his intercession (see Baldacchino 2011).  5. Despite reducing numbers of Maltese attending regular mass, most are still sacramentally Catholic – through baptism, first holy communion, marriage and funeral rituals.  6. I am grateful to Jean-Paul Baldacchino for this observation.

References Althusser, Louis. 1970. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books, pp. 85–126. Asad, Talal. 1970. Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe. London: Hurst.   1983. ‘Anthropological Conceptions of Religion. Reflections on Geertz’, Man 18(2): 237–59.   1986. The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University.   1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.   2006. ‘Responses’, in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 206–42. Baldacchino, Jean-Paul. 2011. ‘Miracles in the Waiting Room of Modernity: The Canonisation of Dun Ġorġ of Malta’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 22(1): 104–24. Baldacchino, Jean-Paul. 2019. ‘Is There No Honour among the Maltese? Paradigms of Honour in a Mediterranean Moral Economy’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 28(1): 88–107. Borg, Jonathan. 2015. ‘The Narratives of Gay Male Teachers in Contemporary Catholic Malta’. Thesis submitted to the University of Sheffield for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

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Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. Carver, Terrell and Samuel A. Chambers. 2007. ‘Kinship Trouble: Antigone’s Claim and the Politics of Heteronormativity’, Politics & Gender 3(4): 427–49. Chua, Liana and Nayanika Mathur. (eds). 2018. Who Are ‘We’? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn. Clifford, James and George Marcus. (eds) 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clough, Paul. 2006. ‘“Knowledge in Passing:” Reflexive Anthropology and Religious Awareness’, Anthropological Quarterly 79(2): 261–83.   2014. Morality and Economic Growth in Rural West Africa: indigenous accumulation in rural Hausaland. Oxford: Berghahn. Clough, Paul and Jon P. Mitchell. (eds). 2002. Powers of Good and Evil: Moralities, Commodities and Popular Belief. Oxford: Berghahn. Cohen, Anthony P. 1992. ‘Post-Fieldwork Fieldwork’, Journal of Anthropological Research 48(4): 339–54. Cole, Maureen. 1994. ‘Outsiders’, in Ronald G. Sultana and Godfrey Baldacchino (eds), Maltese Society: A Sociological Inquiry. Msida, Malta: Mireva, pp. 595–616. Connell, Raewyn W. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Deguara, Angele. 2018. ‘Between Faith and Love? Sexual Morality and Religious Belief among LGBT and Cohabiting Catholics in Malta and Sicily’. Thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Malta.   2020. ‘Secularisation and Intimate Relationships in a Catholic Community: Is Malta a Resistant Niche?’ Social Compass 67(3): 372–88. Durkheim, Emile. 1966 [1913]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen and Unwin. Engelke, Michael. 2002. ‘The Problem of Belief: Evans-Pritchard and Victor Turner on “The Inner Life”’, Anthropology Today 18(6): 3–8. Fernando, Mayanthi L. 2010. ‘Reconfiguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the Limits of Secular Law and Public Discourse in France’, American Ethnologist 37(1): 19–35. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, pp. 87–125. Grimshaw, Anna and Keith Hart. 1994. ‘Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals’, Critique of Anthropology 14(3): 227–61. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Jebens, Holger. 2010. ‘The Crisis of Anthropology’, Paideuma 56: 99–121. Larsen, Timothy. 2014. The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’, Cultural Anthropology 16(2): 202–36.   2004. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Marsden, Magnus. 2005. Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, Jon P. 1998. ’Performances of Masculinity in a Maltese Festa’, in Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary M. Crain (eds), Recasting Ritual: Performance Media Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 68–94.   2002. Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta. London: Routledge.   2006. ‘Performance’, in Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands and Patricia Spyer (eds). Handbook of Material Culture. London: Sage Publications, pp. 384–401. Mogstad, Heidi and Lee-Shan Tse. 2018. ‘Decolonizing Anthropology: Reflections from Cambridge’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36(2): 53–72. Osella, Filippo and Benjamin Soares. 2020. ‘Religiosity and Its Others: Lived Islam in West Africa and South India’, Social Anthropology 28(2): 466–81. Ottenberg, Simon. 1990. ‘Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text’, in Roger Sanjek (ed.), Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 139–60. San Martin, Ines. 2019. ‘Pope Francis Says Homosexual Tendencies Are “Not a Sin”’. Crux website. Retrieved 25 February 2022 from https://cruxnow.com/ vatican/2019/04/pope-francis-says-homosexual-tendencies-are-not-a-sin/. Schielke, Samuli. 2009. ‘Being Good in Ramadan: Ambivalence, Fragmentation, and the Moral Self in the Lives of Young Egyptians’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15.(S1): S24–40. Scott, David and Charles Hirschkind. 2006. (eds). Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Vale De Almeida, Miguel. 1996. The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town. Oxford: Berg. Weber, Max. 1948 [1919]. ‘Science as a Vocation’, in C. Wright Mills and Hans H. Gerth (eds), From Max Weber. London: Routledge, pp. 129–50.

Chapter 8

The Will to Risk

Why the Moral Economy Is Not What You Think A. David Napier

The idea is to die young as late as possible. —Ashley Montagu

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or more than a decade – from 2007 to 2018 – a small group interested in migration, and especially in local responses to outsiders, met in southern Switzerland on a biannual basis to share their respective ideas on the effects of ‘Outsiders’ on social health and perceived well-being. Some members of that group are no longer with us. Among those deceased are Peter Loizos, who died in 2012. Loizos was known especially for his work on Cypriot war refugees and on family alliances, networks and disputes. Another was Alessandro Falassi, who came from an Italian family that had inhabited the same social space since the Middle Ages. Falassi was so entrenched in the life of his mother city, Siena, that he not only wrote a book about its Palio horse race, but became the head (Prior) of one of the oldest districts, the Contrada of the Istrice (the Porcupine). Falassi knew lots about insiders and outsiders, managing to lead an inclusive society he actually studied. The third was Paul Clough. Like Loizos, Clough had a keen interest in migration and refugees. Like Falassi, he understood the symbolic power of local exchange – even, if unlike Falassi, that interest did not lead him into politics and family business. Instead of filling diverse public roles

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Clough’s destiny was to become a keen observer of how place really matters; of how diversity nourishes creativity; and, especially, of when and where migrants prove beneficial to the places to which they migrate. Paul Clough had a significant impact on the conversations that emerged in our small Swiss forum. His personal background made him acutely aware of how creativity depended on the successful merging of difference. He had a deep respect for small-scale economic entrepreneurs, and probably knew more than anyone about West African trade networks. That’s because Clough understood the risks involved in moving from a local, village economy to securing trade across tribal lines and religious and political differences. He knew from fieldwork that when unlike things are successfully merged, something is created that is often greater than the sum of its parts. He also knew well how those who trade with outsiders hedge their bets on failure. Creativity, he understood, demands risk.

The Moral Economy For most of us risk’s existential uncertainty is readily forgotten. In hindsight it is easy to make less of risks’ uneasiness by creating narratives that place the decisions of people who survive them at the centre of a story about challenges overcome: the thrill of victory; the agony of defeat. In doing so we inflate a risk to glorify an achievement; but we withdraw from uneasiness, even at times blaming those who fail at risks taken for their stupidity or lack of preparedness. We shun, that is, uneasiness and uncertainty – even if they are core to the reality of change. That’s because change itself is both ecumenical and amoral – as happily destructive as creative. Either way, change is put in motion by uncertainty. So, let’s not underestimate uneasiness. Merging (creatively, we hope) with someone or something quite different requires a will to risk in the face of not knowing, and especially of not knowing if the merging with otherness will prove creative or destructive. While overcoming such challenges are always part of exploration and adventure, we fear the uncertain enough to lionize those who make good on chance. Hero myths, in this light, are hyper-reactions to uncertainty. That’s why, when I spoke at the University of Malta in 2010 about the immune system as a search engine Paul Clough immediately applied the concept to economic exchange and the challenge of building trade networks. Already, Clough’s interest in economic exchange had resonated

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with the phenomenology of Emmanuel Lévinas, who believed that experiencing the ‘other’ was fundamentally ethical in nature – even constituting a first philosophy, a foundation of consciousness. For Lévinas, our face-to-face encounters with otherness precede self-interest because both transcendence and autonomy emerge in the acknowledgement of things we can never know or possess completely (1969). Like an immune system’s engaging difference, the will to risk becomes essential for facing the unexpected when developing an exchange network in places where one lacks any taken-for-granted social security (Napier 2020). To understand this connection, I need to point out that I have been arguing for some three decades that the immune system is as much a search engine of difference as a defence mechanism (Napier 1992; 2003; 2012). This is because viruses are not alive – they are just information that our cells bring life to. They don’t attack us; rather the thymus (T-cells), bone marrow (B-cells) and multiple lymph nodes within your body and mine produce millions upon millions of unique cells designed to engage the outside world for better or worse. Our cells bring those viruses to life, and we give them to one another through what we do socially. That’s why viruses proliferate, and only proliferate, where people meet. Sometimes we adjust by developing an immune response that allows that outside information to make us resilient. But sometimes viruses bring us life-threatening information, and we succumb. The immune system, that is, is all about extraverted risk – where people adapt or fail to adapt biologically because of the exchanges our bodies engage in when we meet others in social spaces. Just think of what causes a superspreader event during Covid-19 – in short, lots of people together. And that simple idea – that the immune system is as much a search engine as a defence mechanism – led Clough to an astonishing change of economic perspective: this being that if creative adjustment demands extraversion, perhaps the will to risk is as natural to our humanness as are our acts of self-regard (Napier 2012). While seemingly counter-intuitive to anyone focused on self-fulfilment – the heroic survival part that adds fitness to the risk narrative in hindsight – his conclusion is unavoidable from the standpoint of human growth. Because if the immunological Self ‘invites more deeply into itself the dangerous material of the Other, … boundary creation between competitive individuals [in other words, the ‘survival of the fittest’ as an act of self-regard] is undermined as the basis of Selfhood’. If, that is, the new immunology is right, the incorporation of potentially dangerous information into the Self is not only necessary for creation but a fundamental part of our sociality – not just the outcome of external conditions that self-regard can make us wary of. For the immune system

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enlivens a great many things that challenge our well-being and that may, if we are unfortunate, also undo us. And that idea mattered to Clough. Because even if extraversion is not always creative or for everyone, it nonetheless defines our humanness every bit as much as does self-regard. Though extraversion is also intrinsic to uninvited aggression (as in warfare), creativity cannot emerge without risking outside engagement. Indeed, if engagement is as fundamental to adaptation as is self-regard might we use the new immunology, Clough thought, to build a new moral economy? Had Clough lived to witness Covid-19 not long after his untimely death he might have bathed in examples of the moral uneasiness of our biological and economic needs put at risk by the pandemic, and of countless examples of how adamant self-regard can put exchange itself at risk. The obsessive narcissism that characterizes contemporary global politics is one obvious example – not to mention what is lost to inductive reason by retreat and introversion. Clough would have understood the deep tension between meeting biological and economic needs in Covid. That’s because of his familiarity with uneasiness – both as it emerged in his African fieldwork on risk and exchange, and in his interest in the theory of limited good. Back in 1965 George Foster argued that a group’s belief that welfare could be limited gave rise in a social group to a shared focus on the micromanagement of local differences, and a parallel lack of interest in outside opportunity. Foster called this the theory of limited good because it was based on a group’s concern with how to divide limited resources (like toilet paper in Covid-19), providing a fair reason for why so many find engaging the outside exhausting in stressful moments. In short, a belief in limited good made people look inward not outward – just like an ageing cell colony that dies not from its periphery but its centre. However, Clough thought differently than Foster about economics. In Clough’s view communities of people have dynamic relationships with risk-taking – relationships that can and do vary significantly from place to place, over time, and even within otherwise introverted groups. This is not to say that our relation to the Other is either emotionally fickle or even cyclical – assimilating and subsequently rejecting that which cannot be assimilated. The process is more complex, being both linear and recursive – looking forward in a linear sense and into the past at the same time. And that’s for Clough how an economy could become moral – just like the dynamics of immunity. Because even as the body acquires immunity and becomes defensive – even as it exhausts over time its everyday tolerance for difference – it yet continues to seek out and assimilate new

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outsiders. It brings life to new information for better or worse. In short, it never gives up. It can’t! This being so, our creative risks (personally, socially, economically) are, as are our immune systems themselves, as innate to our being human as is the protecting of the Self we believe essential for survival. Because there is simply no way of knowing if either the viral information our immune systems bring to life or the exchanges our social engagements provoke will enhance our resilience or defeat us. We only know either of these in hindsight, as so many extreme risk takers will coldly acknowledge. But here’s the moral part: rather than being ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Outside, what the new immunology tells us about Otherness is this: not only does the Self seek to assimilate difference until an opposition to difference is developed (just as the body acquires immunity) but we can only know in retrospect which kinds of inviting were useful and productive, and which were threatening or even outright hazardous. Indeed, because we can only know these things in hindsight we per force must continue to risk engagement even as we also try to limit the impact of former engagements that have proven unhealthy. There is, thus, a biological dimension to morality; for the enforced seeking of our immune systems nourishes creative possibilities while limiting over time the damaging impacts of new and unexpected information. This being so, to give up on engagement is itself immoral because it undermines our faith in the long-term durability of our relations with others, making narcissists of each and every one of us. And this one simple observation led Clough to a remarkable conclusion about exchange more generally – this being that a long-term perspective on outside encounters is much more important than what happens in the short term; for the premature closure favoured by the short term proves quite unhealthy over time, as it discourages extraverted risk. That’s true not only when the act of prioritizing short-term advantage undermines diversity (because recognizing creative change can take a long time); it’s also true when short-term prioritizing actively undermines long-term survival by eliminating alternatives.

Diversity If extraverted risk is as intrinsic to us as self-regard, the new immunology deeply challenges both the ground rules on evolution and socalled ‘neoliberalism’ in ways we never imagined. For if engagement is as intrinsic to our long-term survival as is self-regard in the short-term,

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it’s actually the risk-taking itself that matters – not the conclusions we attach retrospectively to risks we take when we decide whether, say, the lioness was fittest because she attacked or fittest because her leg muscles allowed her to retreat most swiftly. It’s only in retrospect that we attach personal ‘fitness’ to one or the other. This truth, in short, is what makes Darwinism, and social Darwinism in particular, not only teleological but wrongly allegorical, leading us to think that the weak deserve their destinies. And that’s not all. Our immune systems do something else: they ‘build up a surplus of seemingly useless, or even dangerous material, that turns out – and only in analytical hindsight – to be essential to the existence and reproduction of cellular life’ (Clough 2012: 138). That’s because diverse surplus is critical: we can’t know now which one of the countless cells our bodies create will prove crucial for future adaptation and survival, so we create many diverse prototypes. And that’s where the moral economy comes in – where immunology and economic exchange theory merge to show the foolishness of neoliberal thinking. To understand how they come together – and especially how immunology challenges neoliberal ideas – let’s compare this new view of risk with what others have argued about contemporary risk-taking. While many have studied social risk-taking, most assume it is a tradeoff in pursuing personal gain. Both Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, for example, argued that an awareness of risk produces a reflexive social response in which concepts such as ‘sustainability’ are built around the need to limit or manage uncertainty and danger in order to nourish self-interest. Though Beck (1992) saw the social construction of modern risk more negatively than Giddens (1991), both shared the assumption that risks are the background against which self-preservation and advancement unfold. Either way, as Clough observed, most modern theories of risk take as axiomatic the benefits of focusing on personal gain; for why else take risks? Let’s review briefly Giddens’ well-known theory of risk, for it is openly undermined by any tendency to invite danger and by the new immunology more generally. In Modernity and Self-Identity he famously coupled risk with contemporary capitalism, welcoming it as economically dynamic and innovative because it allows individuals to focus on private, personal gain while also benefitting from globalization. Here, economic risk is seen as something an autonomous Self must contend with: something external to individuals, whose exchanges and economic objectives becomes increasingly privatized regardless of how globally they may be engaged. After all, neoliberalism depends on

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countries like Clough’s Malta selling passports to wealthy oligarchs and helping them to hide their ill-gotten income. Its activities are all about disengaging capital from the moral economy. But not only is Gidden’s theory vulnerable to producing a false history of risk – that is, to believing that extraverted risk is somehow ‘new’ to modernity (for, after all, what was the Age of Discovery if not a grand example of extraverted risk?) – but, to our surprise, biology says something else. If the random B- and T-cells the immune system produces work to invite in risk (as much as that proliferation also works to help us defend against attack), the wilful engagement with the outside (our welcoming of the outside into the Self) has always been definitional of who we are as people and how we identify ourselves as such. Countless anthropologists have, of course, written about boundaries and identity. Indeed, the subject of Self and Other may be what defines anthropology as a discipline. Some see boundary maintenance as identity-critical (e.g. Douglas 1966). Others focus on the negotiated and experiential dimensions of boundary maintenance (e.g. Cohen 1985). While yet others see social boundaries defined by exteriority itself. LéviStrauss, most famously perhaps, saw social identity as a binary inversion of the foreign – as in La Voie des masques (Lévi-Strauss 1982), in which the gods of the Other become our demons and vice versa. While Fredrik Barth saw the outside as so definitional of the social self that he described ‘culture’ as an empty vessel (an unconscious domain of assumptions) that is defined at its boundaries where it is contested and challenged (Barth 1969; Napier 1986; Napier et al. 2014). Diverse though these views of the outside may be, together they share a concern with what I call the anthropological paradox – a recognition that while the notion of ‘it takes one to know one’ may provide a necessary component of culture, it is not in itself a sufficient definition of the concept. For filial and communal relations are only one part of culture. The other part is what culture itself allows to go unstated – all of those inductive assumptions that our very cultural introversion incites us to make. For culture is nothing if not shared conventional understandings, and these have their limits too. That’s because the hardest things to know consciously are the parochial limitations of our private assumptions regarding the worlds we inhabit (assumptions that often remain unstated, unexamined or simply assumed as true). In Foreign Bodies (1992) I pushed this line of thought, arguing that the well-being of any society can be measured not by its overt identity claims about cultural security but by the readiness with which it accommodates things foreign – where introversion and wall-building emerge as less a sign of strength than of insecurity, feared weakness and

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loss of confidence. In this view Barth’s empty vessel becomes a proxy for measuring well-being, because both assumed openness and assumed closure are built on the dynamic valuing or devaluing of otherness. As a culture becomes increasingly dynamic at its peripheries, so too does identity waver as an individual exploit. We are, that is, social as much as individual animals, and to think anything less of the social part of this balance is a big mistake. This fact – appearing sound – leaves only one conclusion: social extraversion is as essential to our being human as is self-regard. That’s because extraversion is not only human, it works across organisms at all levels – hence, the relevance of immunology for social-exchange theory. We need to be engaged, as people of so many persuasions profess while resisting introversion and (as in Covid-19) social distancing. Each of us knows intuitively that face-to-face exchanges are what a moral economy is based upon – a thing we cannot exist without. For every time we look another in the eye and nod affirmatively we commit ourselves to a social contract based on trust. Conversely, every time we think we’ve made such an agreement but haven’t we risk feeling betrayed. Covid-19, here, is mistrust’s ‘perfect storm’. And that need for direct engagement leads us to another conclusion about exchange: if extraversion is critical to growth, what a healthy economy should be doing is what the immune system has done biologically for millions of years – this being, focus on building ‘a reservoir of “things” and “processes”’ (Clough 2012: 139–40) that may seem superfluous but in analytical hindsight – and only in analytical hindsight – are understood as essential. Here, a new moral economy must be both dynamic and plural. Because if the effects of risk are unknowable in advance, healthy economies need to assimilate a wide range of outside things and processes while also learning over time to resist those specific outside things that prove threatening or outright dangerous. To put it simply, pluralism matters to survival. Second, our focus on immediate gain in contemporary capitalism (so fundamental to narcissism; to neoliberal thinking more generally; and, using our previous example, to contemporary Malta’s obsessions with offshore banking) is a very bad idea. For the very calculating of limited risk (the ungenerosity of this practice) destroys our trust in a potential future, because efficiency by definition demands ‘the maximization of individual utility in a short term’ (2012: 140). The short term, that is, leaves no room for the exteriority so critical for Lévinas. Here, ‘the latter-day growth in the relative size of the entire financial sector has been influential in changing the overall emphasis of capitalist

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praxis from Saving to Consumption, and from “planning for the future” to “making material choices now”’ (2012: 140). To be rational is to be efficient, which means extracting the maximum material reward for the individual from a time period defined by environmental or other material constraints. This emphasis on individual maximization leads in neoliberal economic policy to an obsession with the short term. In turn, that leads to a definition of ‘efficiency’ in which costs are cut in relation to benefits, inputs reduced in relation to outputs, and in consequence, ‘streamlining’ and ‘downsizing’ are celebrated. (Clough 2012: 141)

This streamlining, however, has disastrous effects on local economies in the long run because ‘savers’ (as a form of surplus) become an oddity at the same time as small-scale, diversified industries (shopkeepers or family farmers, for example) disappear when they fail to reduce their costs on balance with what they might otherwise gain in the short term.

Efficiency Using work by Jeff Pratt on Tuscan farming (1994) Clough then made another important ‘immunological’ observation: this being that diversity matters, but only if you can sustain it. An old Tuscan farmer without sizable debts can be ‘more successful over several economic cycles than his fellow farmers who mono-cropped – because those who maximized income in [the] short term would be run out of business by large estates in a subsequent cycle when produce prices fell’. Here, survival is only possible for certain small-scale farmers who can remain resilient in the face of short-term demands that force others to give up a diverse set of activities in order to survive each and every agricultural cycle. It’s their diversity, that is, that stands in for the excess capital they lack. There have been some 300,000 farmer suicides in India alone in the past two decades because of failed attempts by small farmers to succeed competitively in monocropping genetically modified cotton. In nearly every one of these cases, crop diversity was abandoned because of the demand to compete in the short term (Kumar and Hashim 2017). In such a setting, where margins of error in the short term destroy long-term interests, only those whose diversified practices and/or family networks that help limit their vulnerability to bankruptcy have even a remote chance of making a ‘slow’ food business into a workable financial proposition. Indeed, only those either socially diverse or wealthy enough to support slow-food initiatives are today positioned to hedge against

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being unexpectedly wiped out overnight by a hostile ‘monocropper’ hell bent on short-term gain. So, social security and the trust it relies on really do matter when it comes to surviving the onslaught of the short term and its ruthless monopolization of difference. That’s why Keynes (1936) saw imposed cutbacks (thrift) as problematic in stressful times. He called this ‘the paradox of thrift’, because cuts in support to already hard-pressed local enterprise especially hurt when the private sector was already stressed (Skidelsky 2009). In short, destroy diversity and you destroy resilience. No exchange system can survive for long if it only thinks about maximizing gain in the short term. Indeed, neoliberalism has always failed badly when it has no welfare to deplete in the interest of short-term gains. And that leads to a third, and perhaps critical, point about why contemporary economic theory, with its focus on maximizing immediate benefits, has so regularly failed both at prediction and at explanation: this being that efficiency is destructive not only because placing all of your eggs in one basket (‘monocropping’) is a recipe for long-term disaster but also because using efficiency to leverage personal gain and profit in the short term destroys the very possibility of having a moral economy at all. This conclusion is inevitable – not only because we can only fully understand diversity’s importance in analytical hindsight (for which, as Clough recognized, ‘the short term of “scientific economics” leaves no room’ [Clough 2012: 141]) but because it is only in hindsight that what appears to be redundant emerges as having been crucial.

Conclusion: So Many Mothers of Invention Thomas Edison once said that in order to be creative ‘you need a good imagination and a pile of junk’. That’s because seeing possibilities in junk is what leads a creative mind to an inventive answer. If there is no redundancy, there’s just nothing latent to work with when your monocropping fails. Creativity dissolves if inefficiencies are eliminated – or ‘recycled’ in the neoliberal short term. Edison’s ‘junk’ disappears well before a creative mind could have made good on a thing appearing useless or redundant. That’s why universities are no longer filled with otherwise absentminded professors, and why they also regrettably seem so challenged in producing new ideas. For if the life of the mind is controlled by the advanced expectation of outcomes our focus shifts dramatically towards closure and overly-inscribed ‘innovation’ – that is, towards the

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modification of an existing art rather than the suspension of judgement that can nourish something new. That’s why we request student evaluations on the last day of class rather than a few years later. That is also why, in spite of what we intuit, modernity may be more caught within an entropic process of slowing down than of speeding up (Napier 2004) – that in our haste to meet short-term innovative expectations and benchmarks (so-called ‘deliverables’) we undermine the very processes on which actual change depends. For invention requires the ability and time to take what is different and find a way of merging it into something greater than its parts, whereas innovation is largely dominated by reverse engineering – being obsessed with making what is already known more efficient. In short, the inventor makes the mousetrap; the innovator builds a better one. That is why the overprescribing of short-term outcomes in academic work has had, and will continue to have, such a long-term and damaging impact on creativity. Because the rules of engagement have themselves been prioritized by the managerial classes over the redundancy and risk of failure that characterizes a longer-term view. Bean counters make today look like yesterday. Being obsessed with rules, they have no interest in major change. Asked once about the rules governing creativity that same Thomas Edison snapped back, ‘Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something’! To create, in other words, demands not only open-mindedness and confidence but also patience in the face of modernity’s premature closure on the unknown. It requires a certain resistance when it comes to recycling the junk pile before it has demonstrated its long-term potential. And it requires, perhaps most important of all, a confidence in the merits of extraverted risk. In conclusion, ‘the continuous breaking of the boundary between Self and Other [implicit in the new immunology] renders problematic the essential axiom of neoclassical economics’ and its selfish individualism – this axiom being ‘that humanity, in its very nature, is constituted by discrete selves who each seek perpetually to maximize the difference between individual benefits and costs – and use a refined calculus that compares potential actions in terms of their comparative net advantage to the actor’ (Clough 2012: 141). Paul Clough expressed great hope even though, alas, he did not live to see the impact of his ideas; for, as he wrote, ‘this solipsistic universe collapses if in fact human beings are radically extraverted … . Their fixation on the Other means that human beings incorporate elements of the Other into themselves to the point of danger and redundancy, even when this means abandoning the strategy of utility maximization’ (2012: 141).

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And that’s why extraversion is as natural to human nature as is the survival of the fittest. For what Paul Clough most keenly understood was that natural selection remains ‘natural’ only so long as we are engaging the Other; but selection itself is not at all ‘natural’ at the level of fitness. In fact, quite the opposite. For we can only know in hindsight if outside catalysts for change have had wonderfully creative impacts or potentially calamitous ones. What is certain, however, is that the neoliberal short term, with its obsessive narcissism, destroys not only a moral economy but long-term survival as well. For diversity is critically required for nourishing the future.

Coda Though the need to sustain a moral economy provides a strong argument for why diversity matters, redressing the balance between extraverted risk and self-regard is more challenging than we might intuit. For such a redress not only demands a new way of conceptualizing the utility of diversified ‘Others’; it also requires a significant ideological shift in how we conceptualize the ‘Self’. In particular it asks for a conscious awareness of how our survival needs are mediated by extraverted risk. To put it another way, if extraverted risk is as innate to our humanness as is self-regard the world is not at all what most of us think. This is a fact easily demonstrated. If you go to your computer and type the word ‘xenophobia’ into its search engine it identifies, at this moment of writing, more than 25,300,000 citations – enough to keep legions of analysts busy over many lifetimes. But type in its antonym ‘xenophilia’ (the extraverted attraction to the Other) and that same search engine will identify only about 161,000 citations That’s far less than 1 per cent (0.6 per cent) of the number concerned with fearing the outside. In fact, until Paul Salopek, a former war correspondent turned global pedestrian, wrote his op-ed article ‘The Case for Xenophilia’ in the New York Times in 2017 there were far fewer (close to no) common uses of the word outside those of us who had written about it in the psychological and social-science literature (Napier 2017). In my own case, until I began using xenophilia as a concept in my work about a decade ago my computer’s spell-checking programme repeatedly told me the word did not exist! But there is more in what immunology tells us regarding how we grow biologically through extraverted risk that ought both to hold our attention and make us wonder if the world is not actually what we once

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thought. As Salopek poignantly concludes in his op-ed piece, ‘I’m not seeking the exotic Other. I’m walking toward the familiarity of people’. Here, what Paul Clough called the ‘scaffold undergirding competition’ (Clough 2012: 142) collapses when, in our most creative moments, it ‘dissolves in favour of ‘the hunger for the Other; the expedition to contact, and even to find, the Other; the urge to exchange’. In such moments, ‘the welcoming of “dangerous material” is more foundational of human being than utility maximization’ (2012: 142). Searching beyond the discrete, self-interested competitor for the sociable extravert, we thereby cast away from reliance on individual points in a time that can be calculated, to explore a long-term horizon of social alliance and mutual growth (Clough 2012: 142).

Indeed, this insight might well stand as Paul Clough’s eulogy. A. David Napier is Professor of Medical Anthropology at University College London and Director of its Science, Medicine, and Society Network. He is coeditor of UCL’s Culture and Health book series, and author of several books and numerous articles on liminality, vulnerability and human well-being. His applied activities including policy work for WHO (World Health Organization) Europe and involvement in three Lancet commissions (Climate Change and Health, Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine, and Culture and Health – for the last of which he served as lead author). A member of the WHO’s Covid-19 Research Roadmap working group, Napier is also Innovations Lead for SonarGlobal – a European Commission-funded network responding to infectious disease outbreaks, antimicrobial resistance and vaccine hesitancy. He is also International Chair of an expert group on the Cultural Contexts of Health and Wellbeing at Vanderbilt University and Global Academic Lead for ‘Cities Changing Diabetes’, working with health departments in over forty cities across the globe.

References Barth, Fredrik. (ed.). 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter. London: Sage. Clough, Paul. 2012. ‘Immunology, the Human Self, and the Neoliberal Regime’, Cultural Anthropology 27(1): 138–43.

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  2014. Morality and Economic Growth in West Africa: Indigenous Accumulation in Hausaland. Oxford: Berghahn. Cohen, Anthony P. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger; An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Foster, George M. 1965. ‘Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good’, American Anthropologist 67(2) April: 293–315. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity. Keynes, John Maynard. 2007 [1936]. The General Theory of the Employment. Interest and Money. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kumar, Ravi S. and Uzma Hashim. 2017. ‘Characteristics of Suicidal Attempts Among Farmers in Rural South India’, Industrial Psychiatry Journal 26 (1): 28–33. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1982 [1972]. The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1969 [1961]. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Napier, A. David. 1986. Masks, Transformation, and Paradox. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.   1992. Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.   2003. The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.   2004.  The Righting of Passage: Perceptions of Change After Modernity. Contemporary Ethnography Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.   2012. ‘Nonself Help: How Immunology Might Reframe the Enlightenment’, Cultural Anthropology 27 (1): 122–37.   2017. ‘Epidemics and Xenophobia, or, Why Xenophilia Matters’, Social Research: An International Quarterly 84(1): 59–81.   2020. ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine: On Herd Immunity and Why it is Important, Anthropology Today 36(3) June: 3–7. Napier, A. David, Clyde Ancarno, Beverley Butler, Joseph Calabrese, Angel Chater, Helen Chatterjee, François Guesnet, Robert Horne, Stephen Jacyna, Sushrut Jadhav, Alison Macdonald, Ulrike Neuendorf, Aaron Parkhurst, Rodney Reynolds, Graham Scambler, Sonu Shamdasani, Sonia Zafer Smith, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, Linda Thomson, Nick Tyler, Anna-Maria Volkmann, Trinley Walker, Jessica Watson, Amanda C de C Williams, Chris Willott, James Wilson and Katherine Woolf. 2014. ‘UCL-Lancet Commission on Culture & Health’, Lancet 384(9954): 1607–39. Pratt, Jeff. 1994. The Rationality of Rural Life: Economic and Cultural Change in Tuscany. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers. Salopek. Paul. 2017 ‘The Case for Xenophilia’, The New York Times, 19 May. Skidelsky, Robert. 2009. Keynes: The Return of the Master. London: Allen Lane.

Index

A academia. See also university crisis in, 146–48 elites in, 142–43 exploitation in, 139 moral labour in, 141–42 neoliberalism internalized by, 135–36 personhood in, 129–36 precarity in, 136 solidarity in, 146–48 values of, 145–46 accessibility, 133 accountability, 113–14 activism, 115–17 adequacy, 103 advocacy, 29 Africa, 19–20 agency, 38 alliance, 51 Anderson, Ruben, 27 anthropology Catholicism in, 158 challenges for, 17–34 crisis in, 1–14, 110–24, 123, 154–57 debate in, 34n1 empire and, 112–14 engagement in, 27–29 ethics of, 10, 110–24, 123 globalization challenging, 19–25 Indigenous people ventriloquized by, 32–33

methodology of, 27–29 morality in, 3, 26–27, 117–21, 124 natural sciences contrasted with, 7 object of, 114–15 otherness developing, 8–9 politics and, 29, 115–17 reflexivity in, 154–57 on refugees, 111 research in, 25–27 as scalable, 13 Scheper-Hughes impacting, 118 understanding of, 18 anti-corruptionists, 52–54 Antimafia, 52–54 anxiety, 45, 47 arrivals, irregular in Greece, 84 islands impacted by, 85 on Lesbos, 92 by sea, 84–85, 91–92 arson, 102–3 Asad, Talal, 158–59 assassination of Caruana Galizia, 38–39, 44–45, 49–50, 54–56, 55, 59n17 Mafia associating, 39 in Malta, 47–48 transparency of, 49 asylum, 85–86, 93, 98 audit, 134–35, 146 authority, 18

188

B Bateson, Gregory, 46 Beck, Ulrich, 178 Bellas, Marcia, 140 bipartisanship, 46–47 blame, 38, 57–58 ‘block grant’ system, 135 Borg, Jonathan, 162, 164, 166–67 Borofsky, Robert, 30 Brazil, 20–21 C Cabot, Heath, 111 capacity, 89 capitalism, 3–4, 21–22, 180–81 captivity, 68 Carter, Kevin, 117 Caruana Galizia, Daphne, 170n2 assassination of, 38–39, 44–45, 49–50, 54–56, 55, 59n17 de Carvalho, Olavo, 31 ‘The Case for Xenophilia’ (Salopek), 184 Catholicism in anthropology, 158 of Clough, 156, 168 fatalism contrasted with, 155 LGBTQ+ identities and, 152–69 sexuality and, 12 De Certeau, Michel, 43–44 Chamberlain, Austen, 1 choice, 163 Church, 162–68 clientelism, 65–66 Clifford, James, 2 Clough, Paul, 19–20, 22, 168, 173, 183, 185 Catholicism of, 156 on economy, 174–75 on extraversion, 12–13, 175–76, 184 reflexivity of, 155 Cohen, Anthony P., 157 da Col, Giovanni, 6 Cold War, 74 Cole, Maureen, 154 collaboration, 33

Index

Collaborative Manifesto for Political Anthropology in an Age of Crises (Vine), 4 colonialism, 3–4, 50–51 community, 132 competition, 65 conditions, 89–90, 101 consecration, 56–57 consistency, 161–62 consumption, 65 containment, 56–57 context, 67–68 contracts, 146 coping, 71, 73 corruption, 53 Cosa Nostra, 59n11 cost, 51–54 Covid-19 pandemic, 176 conditions in, 101 crisis in, 142–46 EU–Turkey Statement on Protection and Reception halted by, 87 migration impacted by, 85 university impacted by, 143 criminality, 26, 41–42 crisis in academia, 146–48 in anthropology, 1–14, 110–24, 123, 154–57 chronic, 65–68, 72, 74–75 as context, 67–68 coping in, 71 in Covid-19 pandemic, 142–46 as cynical, 17–18 diversification in, 67 in economy, 4–5 in education, 12 of empire, 112–14 in Europe, 72, 110–11 generation marked by, 64–65, 70 in Greece, 11, 62 in Malta, 11 morality and, 4–5, 65–68, 100–104 object and, 114–15 permanence of, 70–72 politics in, 115–17

Index

as reference point, 75 reflexivity in, 154–57 relevance demonstrated by, 111 routinization of, 63 solidarity in, 146–48 Stockholm Syndrome in, 66–69, 74–75 temporality created by, 9–10 critique, 11–12 D D’Ancona, Matthew, 34n3 D’Andrade, Roy, 7–8, 121 debate, 34n1 decolonization, 168 Deguara, Angele, 162–67 demand, 89 diversification, 177, 179–80 in crisis, 67 in economy, 184 by farmers, 181 of immunity, 178 security without, 182 drama, 79–80 Dzenovska, Dace, 72–73 E economy in Africa, 20 Clough on, 174–75 crisis in, 4–5 diversification in, 184 of Latin America, 10 morality in, 173–85 of university, 128–29 Edison, Thomas, 182 education, 12, 133 efficiency, 181–82 elites, 142–43 emotions, 50 empire, 112–14 engagement, 27–29, 180 epistemology, 8 Erdoğan, Tayyip, 80–83, 105n6 ethics. See also moral labour of anthropology, 5–6, 10, 110–24, 123 criminality and, 26

189

in empire, 112–14 of ethnography, 25 morality and, 117–21, 153 object and, 114–15, 118–19 precarity impacting, 138–39 Robbins on, 122 ethnography, 13, 25, 119–20 Eurocentrism, 19–25 Europe, 72, 79–104, 110–11 EU–Turkey Statement on Protection and Reception, 80–81 Covid-19 pandemic halting, 87 geographical restriction with, 89 Greece after, 87–90 islands impacted by, 83–84, 84 Lesbos after, 90–95, 91, 92, 94 locals influenced by, 90–91 sea sealed by, 85, 87–88 Evangelism, 24 Evans-Pritchard, Edward E., 7, 158 event, 54 the evoked, 38 expertise, 29 exploitation, 136–39 extraversion, 177–79, 183 Clough on, 12–13, 175–76, 184 immunology and, 180 F faith, 167–69 Falassi, Alessandro, 173 Falcone, Giovanni, 48 families, 98–99 farmers, 181 Fassin, Didier, 119, 120 fatalism, 155 fear, 70 feast (festa), 152, 170n1 fire, 79, 100–104 Foreign Bodies (Napier), 179 foreignness, 50–51 Foster, George, 176 fraternal rivalry, 40–47 future, 70

Index

190

G gain, 180–81 Galemba, Rebecca, 21 Gambetta, Diego, 42, 43 gayness, 162–67 Geertz, Clifford, 8, 158–59 gender, 152–53 generation, 64–65, 70 geographical restriction, 89 Germany, 98 Giddens, Anthony, 178 Gill, Rosalind, 147 globalization, 19–25 Gluckman, Max, 37 God, 167–68 Gold, Marina, 120 good, 130–31 good man (raġel sew), 152–53 government, 31–32, 80 Graeber, David, 6 Grayson, Kyle, 47 Greece. See also islands, Greek border; Lesbos arrivals in, 84 asylum in, 85–86 crisis in, 11, 62 after EU–Turkey Statement on Protection and Reception, 87–90 migration to, 92 Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum, 101–2 guilt, 163–66 H habits, 160–61 Hakken, David, 118 Hale, Charles, 29 Hart, Keith, 27 Hau (journal), 6–7 Herzfeld, Michael, 106n24 heternomativity, 153 Heyman, Josiah McC, 113–14 history, 11–12 Hita, Maria Gabriela, 33 Hochschild, Arlie, 137 homogenization, 22–23 hospitality, 106n24 Huntington, Samuel, 22

I immunity diversification of, 178 extraversion in, 180 otherness contextualized by, 177 risk in, 184–85 as search engine, 174–75 imposter syndrome, 141 Indigenous people, 32–33 individuals, 180 inequality, 4 Ingold, Tim, 27 innovation, 183 intellectuals, 30–32 introversion, 180 invention, 183 Islam, 22–23, 159, 161 islands, Greek border. See also Lesbos arrivals impacting, 85 EU–Turkey Statement on Protection and Reception impacting, 83–84, 84 migration on, 82 with multiscalar approach, 95 refugees received by, 81 Islands of History (Sahlins), 54 Italian Parliamentary Commission, 44 J James, Deborah, 20 Johnson, Boris, 32 K Kapferer, Bruce, 120 Kathimerini (newspaper), 68 Keynes, John Maynard, 182 knowledge, 18, 156–57, 168 Kreditbanken (bank), 69 L Latin America, 10, 19 Lawson, Nigel, 131 Leighton, Mary, 140 Lesbos after EU–Turkey Statement on Protection and Reception, 90–95, 91, 92, 94 arrivals on, 92 living conditions on, 81

Index

transfers from, 94 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 12–13, 175 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 2, 8, 111–12, 113, 179 Lewis, Oscar, 28 LGBTQ+ identities. See also gayness Catholicism and, 152–69 choice and, 163 Church regarding, 162–63 guilt dominating, 163–64 living conditions, 81 locals, 90–91 lockdown, 101–2 Loizos, Peter, 173 M MacGaffe, Janet, 66 Macintyre, Alasdair, 130 Mafia assassination associated with, 39 corruption and, 53 criminality distinguishing, 41–42 emotions influenced by, 50 Gambetta on, 42 in Mediterraneanisms, 51 representations of, 48–49 in Sicily, 42 Mahmood, Saba, 160 Malta assassination in, 47–48 crisis in, 11 feast in, 152 fraternal rivalry in, 40–47 gayness in, 162–67 Mitchell on, 45 politics in, 37–58, 55 sexuality in, 153–54 Sicily contrasted with, 40–43, 52–53 tropes in, 51–54 marginalization, 154 Masco, Joseph, 9 Maurer, Bill, 20 medieval guild system, 132 Mediterraneanisms, 51 Merkel, Angela, 80–83, 105n6 methodology, 27–29 #MeToo movement, 6–7

191

migration, 82, 85, 92, 105n4. See also asylum; refugees Mitchell, Jon P., 45 Modernity and Self-Identity (Giddens), 178 Montagu, Ashley, 173 de Montclos, Pérouse, 22 morality adequacy and, 103 in anthropology, 3, 26–27, 117–21, 124 of clientelism, 65–66 consistency of, 161–62 crisis and, 4–5, 65–68, 100–104 in drama, 79–80 in economy, 173–85 ethics and, 117–21, 153 as knowledge, 156–57 religion and, 157–62 self-determination and, 65–68 subjectivity and, 157–62 moral labour in academia, 141–42 Hochschild and, 137 precarity and, 136–42, 147–48 of staff, 137–38 students necessitated by, 139 Moria, Greece, 79, 95–104, 97, 104. See also Reception and Identification Centre Moria Moscow, 73 Movement on the Ground (organization), 96, 99 multiscalar analysis, 80, 95 MUSEUM. See Society of Christian Doctrine myth, 54 N Napier, David, 12, 179 narrative, 47, 68, 174 nation, 46 natural sciences, 7 neoliberalism academia internalizing, 135–36 capitalism solved by, 24–25 in religion, 23–24 risk challenging, 177–78

192

university transformed by, 133–34, 145 Nixon, Rob, 64 No Go World (Andersson), 27 normalcy, 75–76 normalization, 73 Nostra, Cosa, 59n11 O object, 114–15, 118–19 Olive Grove, 96–97, 97 Olsson, Jan-Erik, 69 opacency, 47–51 opportunism, 57 otherness, 52 anthropology developed by, 8–9 immunity contextualizing, 177 Lévi-Strauss on, 2 reason expressed by, 39–40 overcrowding, 89–91, 100–101 P Pagani detention centre, 95 paranoia, 40–47 Participatory Action Research (program), 129, 144 performance, 152–53 permanence, 70–72, 136–37, 141–42 personhood, 129–36 Pilkington, Hilary, 25 police, 96 politics accountability influenced by, 113–14 activism and, 115–17 anthropology and, 29, 115–17 in crisis, 115–17 in Malta, 37–58, 55 opportunism in, 57 at university, 128–29 pollutive transgression, 56–57 postmodernism, 34n3 post-truth, 30–32 power, 160, 169 Prat, Jeff, 181 Pratt, Andy, 147 Preca, Ġorġ, 170n4 precarity

Index

in academia, 136 ethics impacted by, 138–39 moral labour and, 136–42, 147–48 permanence contrasted with, 141–42 of staff, 144 values contrasted with, 144 prostitution, 51 protection, 46 Puccio-Den, Deborah, 59n11 R raġel sew. See good man reason, 39–40, 47 Reception and Identification Centre Moria (RIC Moria) Olive Grove at, 96–97 overcrowding in, 91, 100–101 police guarding, 96 refugees in, 94 Redfeld, Robert, 7 reference point, 75 reflexivity, 154–57 refugees anthropology on, 111 conditions of, 90 in Europe, 79–104 governance of, 80 islands receiving, 81 in RIC Moria, 94 the rejected, 38 relevance, 111 religion. See also Catholicism; Islam morality and, 157–62 neoliberalism in, 23–24 sexuality and, 169 subjectivity and, 157–62 representations, 48–49 research, 25–27 returns, 86, 88–89 RIC Moria. See Reception and Identification Centre Moria right, political, 13 risk, 173–74 EU–Turkey Statement on Protection and Reception and, 83 extraverted, 175, 177–79, 183–84 in immunity, 184–85

Index

narrative of, 174 neoliberalism challenged by, 177–78 in research, 25–27 university avoiding, 27 Robbins, Joel, 8–9, 120, 122 Robbins Report, 133 Rodima-Taylor, Daivi, 20 routinization, 63, 73 Rugoff, Ralph, 1, 4 rumors, 102–3 S Sahlins, Marshall, 54, 56 Salopek, Paul, 184–85 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 5, 8, 116, 118 Schielke, Samuli, 161, 168 Scholte, Bob, 17 Schuller, Mark, 5 sea arrivals by, 84–85, 91–92 EU–Turkey Statement on Protection and Reception sealing, 85, 87–88 migration by, 105n4 search engine, 174–75 security, 182 self-determination, 62–76 self-regard, 176 sexuality. See also gayness; LGBTQ+ identities Catholicism and, 12 Church and, 164–65 in Malta, 153–54 religion and, 169 shame, 164 Shevchenko, Olga, 73 shrine, 55 Sicily, 40–43, 52–53 silence (omertà), 44, 169 Simoni, Valerio, 4 Singal, Jesse, 6 sociality, 180 society, 74 Society of Christian Doctrine (MUSEUM), 165–66 solidarity, 146–48 Solomon, 140–42 Sophia, 138–40

193

SPA. See Sussex Precarious Academics stability, 62–63, 75–76, 140 staff, 137–38, 144 status quo, 64 Stockholm Syndrome in crisis, 66–69, 74–75 self-determination influenced by, 68–72 in society, 74 ‘Struggling Girl’ (photograph), 117 students, 33–34, 139–40 subjectivity, 157–62, 160 suffering slot, 119–20 Sussex Precarious Academics (SPA), 142 T temporality, 9–10 tents, 97, 98–99 Thatcher, Margaret, 134 Thompson, E. P., 4 trading, 21–22 training, 33–34 transfers, 93, 94 transnationalism, 20–21, 24 transparency, 47–51 tropes, 51–54 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 2 truth, 31–32 Turkey, 86, 88–89. See also EU–Turkey Statement on Protection and Reception U uncertainty, 174 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 93 Universal Church, 24 university audit measured by, 134–35 British, 128–36, 143 as community, 132 Covid-19 pandemic impacting, 143 economy of, 128–29 good motivating, 130–31 intellectuals in, 30–32 with medieval guild system, 132

Index

194

neoliberalism transforming, 133–34, 145 politics at, 128–29 risk avoided by, 27 urgency, 5 V values, 144–46 Venice Commission, 51, 58n2 Vigh, Henrik, 67 violence, 64 virtues, 160–61

La Voie des masques (Lévi-Strauss), 179 vulnerability, 93, 138 W Weber, Max, 133 Wolf, Eric, 17, 113–14 xenophobia, 24 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 62–63 Zone 7, 99