This article presents a positive economic theory of the behavior of appellate judges and Justices. The essay argues that the effort to insulate judges from significant economic incentives, through devices such as life tenure and stringent conflict of interest rules, has not rendered judicial behavior immune to economic analysis. Drawing on analogies to the managers of non-profit enterprises, to those who vote in political elections, and to theatrical spectators, the essay models the judicial utility function in terms that allows judges to be seen as ordinary people responding rationally to ordinary incentives. This model provides a theoretical alternative to the common view of judges as Prometheans or saints, and it suggests new ways of looking at such practical issues as the design of the judicial compensation system.

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What Do Judges and Justices Maximize? (The Same Thing Everybody Else Does)

One defining quality of our current moment is its characteristic state of anticipation, of thinking and living toward the future. Anticipation has epistemic value, a virtue emerging through actuarial saturation as sciences of the actual are displaced by speculative forecast. It is a politics of temporality and affect. Key dimensions are: injunction as the moral imperative to characterize and inhabit states of uncertainty; abduction as requisite tacking back and forth between futures, pasts and presents, framing templates for producing the future; optimization as the moral responsibility of citizens to secure their ‘best possible futures’; preparedness as living in ‘preparation for’ potential trauma; and possibility as ‘ratcheting up’ hopefulness, especially through technoscience. Anticipation is the palpable sense that things could be (all) right if we leverage new spaces of opportunity, reconfiguring ‘the possible.’ We illustrate exemplary sites of anticipatory practice, especially biomedical, highlighting how such sites are gendered, increasingly implicating young girls.

/pdf/anticipation-technoscience-life-affect-temporality-i01v4ckllr.pdf

Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter-century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive ‘‘workfare’’ and expansive ‘‘prisonfare’’ are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of ‘‘bureaucratic field’’ to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the ‘‘disciplinary society,’’ David Garland’s account of the ‘‘culture of control,’’ and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of ‘‘individual responsibility.’’ This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.

/pdf/crafting-the-neoliberal-state-workfare-prisonfare-and-social-1m8qulgxxk.pdf

Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity1: Crafting the Neoliberal State

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

/pdf/three-steps-to-a-historical-anthropology-of-actually-5gke7p6956.pdf

Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism

Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to themPart I: The Historiography of Ethnic Identity: Scholarly & Official DiscoursesThe Naxi and the Nationalities QuestionThe History of the History of the YiDefining the MiaoMaking HistoriesPere Vial and the Gni-P'a: Orientalist Scholarship and the Christian ProjectVoices of Manchu Identity, 1635-1935Part II: The History of Ethnic Identity: The Process of PeoplesMillenarianism, Christian Movements, & Ethnic Change Among the Miao in Southwest ChinaChinggis Khan: From Imperial Ancestor to Ethnic HeroThe Impact of Urban Ethnic Education on Modern Mognolian Ethnicity, 1940-1966On the Dynamics of Tai/Dai-Lue Ethnicity: An Ethnohistorical AnalysisGlossaryReferencesContributorsIndex

Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers

Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming / John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff Millennial Transitions / Irene Stengs, Hylton White, Caitrin Lynch, and Jeffrey A. Zimmermann Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism's Nature / Fernando Coronil Lived Effects of the Contemporary Economy: Globalization, Inequality, and Consumer Society / Michael Storper The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and Maquiladoreas / Melissa W. Wright Freeway to China (Version 2, for Liverpool) / Allan Sekula Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging / Peter Geschiere and Francis Myamnjoh Millennial Coal Face / Luiz Paulo Lima, Scott Bradwell, and Seamus Walsh Modernity's Media and the End of Mediumship? On the Aesthetic Economy of Transparency in Thailand / Rosalind C. Morris Living at the Edge: Religion, Capitalism, and the End of the Nation-State in Taiwan / Robert P. Weller Millenniums Past, Cuba's Future? / Paul Ryer Consuming Geist: Popontology and the Spirit of Capital in Indigenous Australia / Elizabeth A. Povinelli Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils / David Harvey Contributors Index

http://content.ub.hu-berlin.de/monographs/toc/ethnologie/BV019750369.pdf

Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

Ritual and Its Consequences

Robert P. Weller's richly documented account describes the extraordinary transformations which have taken place in Chinese and Taiwanese responses to the environment across the twentieth century. Indeed, both places can be said to have 'discovered' a new concept of nature. The book focuses on nature tourism, anti-pollution movements, and policy implementation to show how the global spread of western ideas about nature has interacted with Chinese traditions. Inevitably differences of understanding across groups have caused problems in administering environmental reforms. They will have to be resolved if the dynamic transformations of the 1980s are to be maintained in the twenty-first century. In spite of a century of independent political development, a comparison between China and Taiwan reveals surprising similarities, showing how globalization and shared cultural traditions have outweighed political differences in shaping their environments. The book will appeal to a broad readership from scholars of Asia, to environmentalists, and anthropologists.

Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan

This is an out of print book, the rights for which have reverted to the author. The version presented here was digitized from a paper copy provided by the author.

Unities and diversities in Chinese religion

Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen

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