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Evicted From Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome
Abstract
Modern Rome is a city rife with contradictions. Once the seat of ancient glory, it is now often the object of national contempt. It plays a significant part on the world stage, but the concerns of its residents are often deeply parochial. And while they live in the seat of a world religion, Romans can be vehemently anticlerical. These tensions between the past and the present, the global and the local, make Rome fertile ground to study urban social life, the construction of the past, the role of religion in daily life, and how a capital city relates to the rest of the nation. Michael Herzfeld focuses on Romeâs historic Monti district and the wrenching dislocation caused by rapid economical, political, and social change. Evicted from Eternity tells the story of the gentrification of Montiâonce the architecturally stunning home of a community of artisans and shopkeepers now displaced by an invasion of rapacious real estate speculators, corrupt officials, dithering politicians, deceptive clerics, and shady thugs. As Herzfeld picks apart the messy story of Montiâs transformation, he ranges widely over many aspects of life there and in the rest of the city, richly depicting the uniquely local landscape of globalization in Rome.
... It might not be merely old and new residents who risk evanescing, but the democratic horizon itself. While media and other commentators routinely include Italian right-wing leaders among the co-protagonists of a transnational catalogue of illiberal political horrors, 7 a more encompassing scope indicates that "democracy" more generally is on the brink of becoming an empty signifier, hollowed-out (also) by neoliberal capitalism (Brown 2015) and its local enticements and coercions (Herzfeld 2009). National elections may become "occasions for subverting democratic institutions," and inadequate governments sometimes "prefer to claim impotence rather than power" (Krastev 2014: 40, 69). ...
... In Rome (the "Metropolitan City of Rome Capital," if we include surrounding, equally densely populated locales), it has become clear that the neoliberal promise of city beautification, job flexibility, human capital cultivation, prompt re-employment, and life-long competitiveness does not equally work for its four million residents (including half a million non-citizens: CMRC n.d.: 15; see also Clough Marinaro & Thomassen 2014). In its historic and tourismattracting center, residents are frequently "evicted from eternity" (Herzfeld 2009) by gentrifying dynamics; across neighborhoods they are pushed into the hands of usurers by precarious employment, gambling, soaring mortgage interest rates and utilities, and banks' unwillingness to lend personal or business credit. ...
The article addresses the tension between the internalization of a violent border regime intent on preempting migrant arrivals and the everyday democratic struggle against that regime. It builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Rome to illuminate conflicting political imaginations and existing practices of the already plural, albeit unequal, Italian polity. On the one hand, we see a bordered democracy. This democracy keeps investing in nationalizing itself, by fortifying the Mediterranean as a lethal border and by shoring up social, economic, and racialized boundaries. On the other hand, there is also an emerging migrant democracy. This migrant democracy actively works on two interrelated fronts: to build a more democratic, pluralistic, and egalitarian polity, and to reform how legal and physical access to the polity is governed in the first place. The article argues that, on both fronts, the anti-Fascist Constitution of Italy offers a viable political and ideological framework. More generally, the article proposes that if democratic politics and constitutional arguments are to produce more than a rhetorical edifice for democracy, they need to attend to the social, economic, and racialized inequalities of life in common.
... Com esse material, analisarei os modos pelos quais ocorrem as disputas sobre a definição do que é propriamente religioso. Estimulado pela proposta do dossiê "Religião e cidades brasileiras, caminhos cruzados", ainda, proponho um diálogo com a literatura antropológica especializada em santuários católicos (Turner e Turner 1978, Eade e Sallnow 1991, Steil 1996, levando em consideração o protagonismo dos aspectos espaciais da religião (Knott 2008, Herzfeld 2009) no contínuo processo de fazer-cidade (Agier 2015). Assim, argumento que a disputa religiosa em Aparecida se dá através da materialização dos seus empreendimentos urbanos. ...
... A qualidade dessa acolhida e recepção passa, invariavelmente, pela infraestrutura urbana: sistema de transporte, hospedagens, lazer, comércio, alimentação e saúde. Extravasando a narrativa do bispo, centrada exclusivamente naquele santuário, é possível localizá-la em uma genealogia ainda mais ampla: a do contínuo protagonismo da Igreja Católica na urbanização de Roma (Westfall 1975, Herzfeld 2009). Logo, uma tendência das principais missões religiosas do clero católico seria promover o desenvolvimento urbanístico e econômico da cidade. ...
Este artigo integra o dossiê temático “Religiões e cidades brasileiras, caminhos cruzados” e tem por objetivo analisar antropologicamente como a religião é uma categoria fundamental para o desenvolvimento urbano da cidade paulista de Aparecida. Essa pequena cidade, com uma população de 36 mil habitantes, é famosa por sediar o Santuário Nacional de Nossa Senhora Aparecida, a padroeira católica do Brasil. Por esta razão, tornou-se um dos centros de peregrinação mais prestigiados do país, recebendo mais de dez milhões de peregrinos anualmente. Neste artigo, essa configuração urbana peculiar é explorada etnograficamente a partir de uma pesquisa de campo de longa duração, complementada por notícias, fotografias e entrevistas. O principal argumento do artigo é que a religião é praticada e disputada espacialmente. Isto é, o desenvolvimento urbano está imbricado com o fenômeno religioso e com as diferentes categorias de grupos que fazem a cidade, tais quais os padres, romeiros e aparecidenses.
... This expansion has not been driven by population growth, which has remained stable at around 2.8 million since the 1990s, but by land rent and the housing bubble, up until the economic crisis. Young or impoverished individuals and immigrants have sought more affordable but distant housing (Mudu 2014), while central districts have experienced gentrification and a very rapid rise in short-term tourist rentals (Annunziata 2017;D'Eramo 2017, 100-101;Herzfeld 2009), leading to an influx of temporary residents (Brollo and Celata 2023). ...
This article examines whether the theory of the ‘revenge of the
places that don’t matter’ applies to urban districts within a metropolis like Rome, Italy. To contribute to this body of literature, we test the hypothesis of a ‘deprivation loop’ arising from local issues related to socio-economic marginality and urban deprivation. To explore this hypothesis, we analyse the relationships among compositional and contextual indicators using principal components analysis. We then use the resulting factor components as explanatory variables in multiple linear regression analyses of voting patterns. Between 2000 and 2023, electoral outcomes reveal that left-wing parties perform best in semi-central, densely populated districts, while right-wing and populist parties gain more support in low-density, sprawling outskirts. Other areas exhibit more variable trends following the turning points of 2008 and 2016. Our findings indicate that certain territorial determinants of discontent enhance electoral support for right-wing or populist parties by channelling protest votes. Key factors include residence in new sprawling districts with many young households, in socially challenged and marginal areas with a high prevalence of precarious or underemployed workers (often foreigners), and generally in ‘left behind’ places.
... Thu Thiêm residents are actively engaged in many actions of everyday and overt resistance to topdown development projects (Harms, 2012;Scott, 1985). Herzfeld (2009) argues that a brutal order of eviction works as a kind of terminal switching between the older residents who stakes their neighborhood and kinship. They also feel the threat from those new entrepreneurs who made enormous profits in the case of modern Rome development. ...
The Jakarta government evicted an urban community of Akuarium in 2016, which caused socio-economic and immaterial difficulties. Yet, violent eviction instigated a kind of play in the community. A theory of urban play envisages how the community responds and utilizes failed development projects drawing from the practices of graffiti, car jockeys, and navigation of traffic jams. The research method includes field and internet ethnography. The research uncovers precarious life in the community due to existing poverty and the incident of eviction. Their poverty informs a structural problem of low income. The eviction exacerbates the condition with the erasure of the economy, housing, and cultural life, leading to a repressed mental state among them. Akuarium people enact an urban play as a small tactic responding to various kinds of violence and the difficulty of eviction in the function of survival.
... The many ethnographic studies conducted with the neoliberal arena as their main rhetorical and organizational meta-context have pursued different directions. One was a more "materialist" direction linked to the political economy perspectives of the 1980s or at any rate interested in economic and political dimensions, such as those presented in the volume Millennium Capitalism edited by John and Jean Comaroff in 2001 as well as Herzfeld's (2009) ethnography on the effects of gentrification in a neighborhood in the city of Rome. A second was the direction more directly influenced by Foucauldian theses on governmental mechanisms and processes of subjectification. ...
Anthropology in Spain has been strongly institutionalised in recent years through its presence in academic spaces. Nowadays the discipline is pursuing its institutionalisation through professional development outside the academic field. In this text, we present what has been called the first proto Anthropology in the light of the discussion about who should construct the history of the discipline. Then we developed a series of events that allow us to mark what we have called the “chronology of a discipline”, which we have found useful to situate the reader in the Spanish context. Starting by highlighting the links between Social Anthropology and folklore studies in its beginnings, we followed a line through the discipline developed in contemporary times. We focus our descriptions on the development of ethnographic museums, the associations of scholars and intellectuals that gave rise to the discipline’s first scientific journals and its subsequent institutionalisation in the academic world. Here we highlight the studies on the process of identity construction in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. We conclude our chapter by focusing on the development of the periodic anthropological congresses that have given shape to the discipline, and that serve as a reference space for thinking about Social and Cultural Anthropology as a profession.
... Cultural and heritage tourism are powerful drivers for national economies and local livelihoods in many countriesespecially in Nepal -and therefore the destruction of cultural heritage can lead to long-term financial losses and livelihood disruptions [1,32,33]. Therefore, the loss of cultural heritage can have negative impacts on individual, communal, and broader societal levels [34][35][36][37][38]. ...
... This new urban development was driven by the dynamics of land rent and by the housing bubble, without reflecting real population growth, which remains stable at around 2.8 million inhabitants since the 1980s (Mudu, 2014), and -a typical characteristic of Rome -without following the guidelines of the urban plan (Lelo, 2015;Cellamare, 2014). In recent years centrally-located housing have become increasingly expensive, and are often targeted to a growing tourist market, or dedicated to luxury rentals, so that the city centre has undergone a generalized process of gentrification (Herzfeld, 2009). In contrast, the weakest social groups -young couples, temporary workers, immigrants, separated and divorced individuals -move where affordable homes are located: in the outermost neighbourhoods beyond the GRA (Rome's ring road). ...
The book collects many interesting studies devoted to the long-term consequences, issues and challenges imposed by the coronavirus global emergency.
The book aims at providing a detailed and, as far as possible, complete picture of the state and evolution of regional and urban inequalities in Italy during the COVID-19 crisis, jointly with implications and insights for future policies.
... It goes beyond the scope of the paper to discuss the case of each of those neighbourhoods, many of which have been gentrifying for decades. The more recent tensions arising from the inflow of temporary populations are frequently a contraposition between them and earlier gentrifiers, like in the Monti neighbourhood (Herzfeld, 2009). In other places gentrification is more recent and more strictly connected to the inflow of temporary inhabitants. ...
Temporary populations – tourists, temporary stayers, non-resident students – constitute a substantial share of many cities’ inhabitants. Their implications are normally the object of separate research, about over tourism, studentification, transnational gentrification. When viewed from the perspective of the sociospatial relations those populations have in and with the city, many similarities emerge in their urban practices, socio economic characteristics, locational and housing preferences. The paper aims to contribute to recent attempts to avoid traditional categorisations and investigate jointly how the inflow of temporary inhabitants produces effects at the urban and sub-urban scales. The COVID-19 pandemic will then be used as a natural experiment to estimate how they distribute in the city of Rome, Italy, which is crucial to a better understanding of their impact. Temporary populations, we argue, are a very visible source of both hard and soft urban changes, and a major driver of not only neighbourhood change but sociospatial polarisation at the whole city scale. The pandemic also offers an occasion to see how dependent cities are on temporary inhabitants and to reflect upon the ambivalence in how they see those populations as either a gain or a burden, something they struggle to attract or as a source of tensions and opposition.
... This new urban development was driven by the dynamics of land rent and by the housing bubble, without reflecting real population growth, which remains stable at around 2.8 million inhabitants since the 1980s (Mudu, 2014), and -a typical characteristic of Rome -without following the guidelines of the urban plan (Lelo, 2015;Cellamare, 2014). In recent years centrally-located housing have become increasingly expensive, and are often targeted to a growing tourist market, or dedicated to luxury rentals, so that the city centre has undergone a generalized process of gentrification (Herzfeld, 2009). In contrast, the weakest social groups -young couples, temporary workers, immigrants, separated and divorced individuals -move where affordable homes are located: in the outermost neighbourhoods beyond the GRA (Rome's ring road). ...
The aim of this essay is to trace the red thread linking the physical urban dimension of the city of Rome-heavily influenced by the phenomenon of abusiveness-with the economic and social aspects, highlighting the structural inequalities that its citizens experience and how these have been exacerbated in recent times and with the current pandemic crisis. Having initially underlined the importance and the implications of intra-urban inequalities in today's society, in the final part we will try to examine and reflect upon the effectiveness of the various policies implemented.
... Heritage activism and advocacy can be engaged with social movement against urban changes that threaten original cultural context. There are studies on the importance of heritage activism and advocacy to contest and resist enforced urban change ignoring local histories and cultures (Casari & Herzfeld 2015;Hammami & Uzer 2018;Herzfeld 2009;Ingram 2016;Mozaffari 2015;Non 2016). Heritage activism and advocacy which engaged with resistance movement gives alternative narrative for communities to against exclusion and oppression caused by top-down planning. ...
This article explores the complex connections between gentrification, heritage and othering in Amsterdam Oost, a district shaped by intertwined (post)colonial and (post)migrant histories. It does so by examining two temporary heritage‐making initiatives coordinated by the nearby ethnographic Tropenmuseum to celebrate the rich immigration history of the area. Building on the notion of ‘gentrification consciousness’ (Sze, 2010), we draw attention to the ambivalent position of the museum towards gentrification in Amsterdam Oost, and how this ambivalence may contribute to the unfolding of neoliberal urban redevelopment in the area. The projects at the centre of our analysis promote a positive and edifying representation of local diversity as an asset to be protected, celebrated, and valorized; yet they also mobilize problematic colonial tropes that are instrumental in transforming the area into a space of aestheticized multicultural urbanity attractive to a Dutch middle class with an increasingly cosmopolitan outlook. While scholarship on heritage‐led gentrification and cosmopolitan urbanism has amply discussed how local governments, developers and newcomers alike strategically mobilize ethnic heritage discourses and practices to trigger or sustain gentrification, our study reveals heritage institutions as emergent subjectivities in neoliberal urban politics and problematizes their growing imbrication within processes of gentrification.
In recent years, the image of a Catholic Church needing renewal has deepened in the German public arena. The Synodal Path identified structural aspects underlying the ecclesial crisis and proposed solutions debating issues such as clerical power, sexuality, participation, and the role of women. Considering the importance of these deliberations for the universal Church and their controversial international discussion, the need for intercultural dialogue became increasingly clear.
The empirical project “Synodal Way – Global Church Perspectives” aimed to weave the polyphony of Global-Church perspectives into the debate. This volume presents the research’s results and their analysis by academics from different world regions, fills a gap in intercultural mediation, and offers an inspiring contribution to the ongoing synodal dialogue.
This paper reflects ethnographically on law enforcement against squatting in Milan. To this end, it examines labor practices, moral economies, and everyday narratives of those who work with the institutional mandate of tackling squatting in public housing. I propose to grasp these processes considering two specific political and legal configurations that traverse the arena under investigation: the entrenched presence, in the Italian context, of what has been defined as penal populism; additionally, the increasingly pronounced prominence of an infra‐legal dimension of law. Squatting—and the way in which it is publicly managed and punished—represents a privileged lens for examining the specific forms of normative and political governance in contemporary cities.
Renewal plans for downtown Bogotá have been closely tied to “urban decay,” a notion that experts conceptualize as a natural trajectory to be reversed through demolition and reconstruction. Yet for residents on the west side of Bogotá’s city center, planning regulations and official systems of valuation deteriorated their neighborhoods long before the arrival of eviction notices and bulldozers. Drawing on the local analytic of “archaeology of decay,” I develop the concept of ruinous knowledge to explore urban dwellers’ archaeological sensibilities as they sift through the traces and remains of collapsing urban worlds. Shaped by the imaginaries of Colombia's history of warfare, such grounded and intimate knowledges point to the banal materialities and protracted temporalities of urban destruction and dispossession. Ultimately, they emerge as an ambiguous subaltern epistemology and political practice that uncovers the destructive violence at the core of urban planning, while remaining entangled with the normative orders of citizenship and belonging.
This chapter reconstructs developments in U.S. cultural anthropology between 1973 and the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Adopting a Gramscian perspective, it proposes a four-phase chronology: 1973–1986 (Struggle for leadership), 1986–1990 (Transition); 1990–2001 (Hegemony), and 2001–2020 (Deflagration). Through the succession of the four phases, it shows the articulation of relationships between different theoretical perspectives and research centers. In particular, it maps the divergences between realist and materialist positions, on the one hand, and interpretive and deconstructionist positions, on the other. The essay then underlines how a new theoretical-analytical space has been developing since the early 1990s, defined by the relationships between theories of praxis, conceptualizations of power, cultural constructions of the self, gender and subjectivity, historiographical imagination and ethnography (understood as both practice and a critical awareness of the poetics and politics of representation). This theoretical scenario did not dissolve during the first decade of the new millennium; rather, research themes underwent a process of pulverization and there was a marked increase in researchers’ ethical, political, and cognitive engagement.
This paper will chart the multiple ways that regulated tenants in my family home of Webb Place, a tenement building in Kensington, London, experience gentrification-induced displacement. I then discuss how community and creativity play a part in their resistance and survival. Landlords and property management companies have subjected regulated tenants, in this specific context, to a long process of ‘slow violence’ and displacement that has included negligence and harassment intended to stress, harm, anger, and ultimately push out residents. Not only does this ‘slow violence’ occur behind the closed door of the building but so does resistance to it. Communal interaction and creativity have helped regulated tenants to mock power structures and repurpose space while also trying to survive the gentrification of their home. While this displacement is not unique to regulated tenants, this paper adds to much-needed theoretical work that centres on regulated tenants—indeed, in-depth analysis of gentrification and displacement among this subfield is essentially non-existent in the UK, until now.
Le concept de crise de masculinité a été introduit dans la littérature depuis les années 1990 dans plusieurs contextes du sud comme du nord. Cette crise est due en partie aux changements économiques dans les sociétés patriarcales dont l’éclipse partiel du rôle de l’homme « gagne-pain » et dominant sur l’Espace public. Cet article discute quelques aspects de cette crise de masculinité parmi les jeunes égyptiens de classe moyenne dans un contexte assez conservateur, le Delta oriental du Nil. L’article explore d’abord la masculinité entre modèles, performance et discours. Ensuite, il montre comment les jeunes hommes l’aperçoivent et comment ils s’expriment sur l’ambiguïté actuelle des espaces classiques de performance masculine. Enfin, l’article aborde les nouveaux espaces offrant une certaine mixité tolérée entre les jeunes hommes et femmes. L’article avance l’importance d’une approche qui explore l’espace comme véhicule de pouvoir pour une compréhension plus approfondie des dynamiques des rapports de genre.
Mots clés : masculinité, rapports de genre, espaces patriarcaux, Égypte, performance
What happens when religious sites, objects and practices become cultural heritage? What are —religious or secular—sources of expertise and authority that validate and regulate heritage sites, objects and practices? As cultural heritage becomes an increasingly popular and influential frame, these questions arise in diverse and challenging manners. The question who controls, manages, and frames religious heritage, and how, arises with particular urgency. Case studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom present an analysis of the paradoxes and challenges that arise when religious sites are transformed into heritage.
City spaces not only reflect doctrinal religious ideas in orientation and monumental architecture, they also both reflect and enable pragmatic accommodations to human frailty. Long-term immersion in ethnographic research reveals the linkages and tensions between the structure of official religious morality and the reality of everyday social practice. Using field materials from Greece, Italy, and Thailand, I offer suggestive examples of such practical accommodations, both in the religious principles underlying bureaucratic approaches to urban spatiality and in the construction of local places of worship and commemoration. Displays of orthopraxy overlie locally pertinent (and sometimes divergent) conceptions of religiosity that are nevertheless historically and formally linked to doctrinal orthodoxy. Formal religions, like nation-states, often depend on the covert presence of cultural intimacy (here “religious intimacy”) – spaces for the recognition and quiet toleration of divergent attitudes and practices – for their long-term survival. Displays of loyalty and religiosity are thus primarily practices of identity rather than expressions of the complexity of innermost belief, and, as such, they form a protective façade of structural consistency that hides the internal tensions and accommodations generated between doctrine and practice by the human foibles and social ambiguities of everyday life.
Le texte se propose de mener une analyse préliminaire de la chaîne de valeur de l’alimentation italienne à partir de l’analyse de l’agriculture sociale, en particulier les fermes sociales associées aux « activités antimafia ». L’analyse part du principe selon lequel l’agriculture sociale est multifactorielle. Le texte repose sur trois études de cas issues de régions italiennes différentes : la Sicile, la Campanie et le Latium. La ferme sicilienne est la plus développée en termes de sophistication de la production ; la ferme de Campanie, de petite taille, accorde une grande importance résultats non liés aux produits de base, notamment le bien-être et la restauration des paysages ; la ferme située dans le Latium, enfin, offre une réponse tangentielle aux activités de la mafia, bien que ses gestionnaires les définissent comme une forme de résistance directe à la mafia à Rome.
Patrimônio, como “herança cultural da humanidade” é uma tecnologia social que transforma a cultura e, por conseguinte, as práticas íntimas e cotidianas das pessoas em uma espécie de propriedade. Como consequência da onda neoliberal, o patrimônio vem sendo configurado como um recurso particular ou comunitário de valor essencial, capaz de alimentar economias de conhecimento através das quais é possível mercantilizar a vida moral, rotineira e familiar do cidadão brasileiro. Neste texto, como extensão de abordagens antropológicas do patrimônio, argumento que uma oscilação entre propriedades culturais alienáveis e inalienáveis construídas sobre rotinas cotidianas, ou o que tem sido considerado, na Bahia, como uma espécie de essência humana alienável e supervisada pela UNESCO, se baseia numa forma de cercamento. Isso significa que qualidades humanas são encurraladas e garimpadas por meio de regimes técnicos de tombamento histórico. Por conseguinte, esse argumento segue a lógica da mercantilização desenfreada sob os auspícios do neoliberalismo. Também considera que o conceito de cercamento pode ser estendido desde análises de desapropriação de terras comuns até o marketing da imagem de um povo. Ao escolher essa abordagem, pretendo sugerir caminhos para pesquisas futuras sobre a produção global do valor e suas relações com as lutas contemporâneas por justiça social.CULTURE, CONTENT, AND THE ENCLOSURE OF HUMAN BEING: UNESCO'S “intangible” heritage in the new millenniumCultural heritage, or patrimony, is a technology that transforms people's everyday habits, or culture, into forms of property. Thus in neoliberalism's wake, patrimony has been configured as a source of value essential to development schemes that stress knowledge economies. In this review and extension of anthropological approaches to patrimony, I argue that a vacillation between alienable and inalienable cultural properties constructed around quotidian habits, or what has been construed as some sort of human essence supervised by UNESCO, has come to rest today on a hybrid form of mining and enclosure of human qualities. I follow the logic of a rampant commodification under neoliberalism and consider how enclosure may be extended conceptually from analyses of land to the marketing of a peoplehood. My goal in doing so is to suggest avenues for future research on the global production of value and its relationship to struggles for social justice today.Key-words: Heritage; UNESCO; Historical Centres; Neoliberalism; Commodification. CULTURE, CONTENU ET LA CLÔTURE DE L'ÊTRE HUMAIN: le patrimoine “immatériel” de l'UNESCO dans le nouveau millénaireLe patrimoine culturel est une technologie qui transforme les habitudes quotidiennes des gens, ou leur culture, en formes de propriété. Ainsi, à la suite du néolibéralisme, le patrimoine a été configuré comme une source de valeur essentielle aux schémas de développement qui mettent l'accent sur les économies du savoir. Dans cette revue et extension des approches anthropologiques au patrimoine, je soutiens qu'un vacillement entre les biens culturels aliénables et inaliénables construits autour des habitudes quotidiennes, ou ce qui a été interprété comme une sorte d'essence humaine supervisée par l'UNESCO, est aujourd'hui fondé sur une forme hybride de l'exploitation minière et de la clôture des qualités humaines. Je suis la logique d'une marchandisation rampante sous le néolibéralisme et considère comment la clôture peut s'étendre conceptuellement de l'analyse de la clôture des champs communautaires à la commercialisation d'un peuple. Mon objectif est de suggérer des pistes pour futures recherches sur la production mondiale de valeur et sa relation avec les luttes pour la justice sociale aujourd'hui.Mots-clés: Patrimoine; UNESCO; Centres historiques; Néolibéralisme; Marchandisation.
This article examines the hitherto overlooked temporal politics and resultant injustice in theorizing urban transformations in China. Through a micro‐level, in‐depth case study of the lifespan of Guangling New City, it unravels the complex and at times conflicting ways in which different temporal dimensions of this mega project were manipulated, exploited and experienced. In particular, it unravels the organization of, and the divisions within, the dominant elites and illustrates how their conflicting and changing interests in time shaped the trajectory of the new city project. Residents caught up in the urbanization process were not completely opposed to the dominant temporalities of the project. Some of them partially submitted to its promises and visions; others gained a marginal degree of control over the temporalities. Both outcomes contradictorily reproduced their submission to dominant interests and power in the urban development game. Time thus played a critical role in enabling and sustaining land‐based accumulation, despite the injustice involved. On this basis, this article calls for a more grounded approach to bring out the messy and contradictory temporal politics of urban development in order to improve the planning and delivery of megaprojects.
In this piece Michael Herzfeld and Loretta Lees reflect upon their roles as urban studies scholars based in the academy, and what their positionality means regarding the communities that they have engaged with.
Contemporary justice‐making processes often focus on reconciliation or legal retribution, but not on the complexity of victimhood beyond individual subjectivity or refusals of state propositions for social repair. In Colombia, where drug cartels and state‐sponsored violence had terrorized the population for over fifty years, it was not forgiveness and acceptance that punctuated the turn of the twenty‐first century, but the refusal to reconcile with the state's duplicity regarding the disappearance and death of thousands. This essay illustrates how irreconciliation as an affective sentiment is taking shape in Colombia through forms of reattribution that take the form of victim visibilizations . In analysing the strategic use of victim visibilizations as a refusal of state accountability , their expansion of the notion of victimhood, and their politics of irreconciliation, I show how even with the state's remorse‐driven discourses, the public's understanding that political, judicial, and social accountability was not possible and pushed them to chart new strategies for disclosure and healing.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) was established by the UK government in 2015 in response to increasing reports of child sexual abuse in a range of institutions, including Catholic organisations. In the latter, the abuse of minors has been investigated in the broader context of the “clergy abuse scandal”, notably the Catholic Church’s widely documented cover-up of a disconcertingly growing number of priests convicted of sexually assaulting children across the world. Adopting a Foucauldian perspective on confession, this article sets out an anthropological and historical approach to the study of the “clergy abuse secret”, as a historically constructed, and politically contested, “confessional arena”. Drawing on ethnographic analysis of IICSA’s public hearings, and interviews with survivor and church organisations in England, it comparatively pinpoints three, interrelated confessionals that differently organise speech and silence in relation to the abuse secret: the confessional booth, survivor clinics, and the Inquiry’s “digital courtroom”. Breaking the silence is necessary in each of these contexts. Each of them, however, organises the secret’s revelations in profoundly different ways, for different aims, and in the presence of different audiences. By exploring the different social settings in which the abuse secret is recursively confessed, this article sheds light on survivors’ confessional path from silence to public disclosure, revealing how their narratives are variously shaped, constrained, enabled, or censored through conflicting “games of truth”.
This chapter analyses the housing struggle at the neighbourhood level by looking at the territorial activities that Coordinamento has organized in two different but paradigmatic areas of Rome: the neighbourhoods Cinecittà and Ostiense. At this scale, the housing resistance acquires a social function as it provides services and functions that public institutions fail to deliver in deprived or highly gentrified parts of the city. The main argument is that movement organizations approach the space strategically, building up their social function within the spatial constraints of the areas, inserting in the spatial opportunities provided by the structure. In turn, this attempt changes the spatial structure from which it is nurtured. Indeed, the social function of these actors shape new local dynamics by triggering social ties, and mutuality.
In February 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake had devastating consequences for thousands of people living in remote mountainous areas of Papua New Guinea. As the physical world around them collapsed and decayed, many sought to understand what had happened within ontological frames grounded in science and Christianity. Both these speak of decay in physical or moral order, and an inexorable end that is without human cause. The ultimate effect of these new schemas negated the possibility that earthquake-affected local people might view themselves as agents of cause and control with respect to natural disasters, contrasting profoundly with traditional beliefs and practices.
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In February 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake had devastating consequences for thousands of people living in remote mountainous areas of Papua New Guinea. As the physical world around them collapsed and decayed, many sought to understand what had happened within ontological frames grounded in science and Christianity. Both these speak of decay in physical or moral order, and an inexorable end that is without human cause. The ultimate effect of these new schemas negated the possibility that earthquake-affected local people might view themselves as agents of cause and control with respect to natural disasters, contrasting profoundly with traditional beliefs and practices.
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
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