The Life of Viktor (An Easter Folktale from Central Europe)
Editorial note: This text was submitted by a colleague who wishes to remain anonymous; he has informed us that “this version of Viktor’s tale has been embellished in…
Author: Focaal Web Editor
Georg Materna: “Two tribes of capitalists”: Neoconomists and politiconomists in a Senegalese marketplace
Research on capitalism commonly distinguishes between neoclassical economics and political economy. If neoclassical economics have dominated scientific debates since the 1930s at the latest, the ninet…
Patrick Neveling and Tijo Salverda: How capitalists think—about belonging, moralities, global entanglements, and historical social processes, for example
Given that nowadays most people live in societies organized according to capitalist principles and given that few oppose those principles fundamentally, capitalists may well constitute the world’s lar…
Focaal Volume 2018, Issue 80: The political in/of Europe
We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology has recently published and is available online at its new home, www.berghahnjournals.com/foc…
Marc Edelman: Sacrifice zones in rural and nonmetro USA: Fertile soil for authoritarian populism
Sacrifice zones—abandoned, economically shattered places, with growing social and health problems—are spreading in historically white rural areas and small towns across the United States. Rural declin…
David Graeber: Manufactured ignorance: The strange case of Juan Cole and the Kurdish Freedom Movement, and the International Liberal Intelligentsia
This is a story about how a well-meaning liberal American professor can end up becoming an active propagandist for right-wing forces attempting to destroy a feminist revolution. •…
Heike Becker: “Global 1968” on the African continent
Fifty years after student protests shook much of the Cold War world, in the “West” and in the “East,” “Global 1968” has become the catchphrase to describe these…
Quinn Slobodian: Against the neoliberalism taboo
Daniel Rodgers has written the latest would-be obituary for neoliberalism as a category of analysis, hot off the press in the first 2018 issue of Dissent magazine. Like…
David Hamou and Ida Susser: Where to Catalonia?: Is this commoning? What for independence?
As we sit here in Barcelona, a historic center of anarchism and left resistance, the questions debated in the most recent Focaal special section “Exploring the urban commons” confront us.…
Focaal Volume 2017, Issue 79: Exploring the urban commons
We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology has recently published and is available online at its new home, www.berghahnjournals.com/foc…
Mahmudul H Sumon: An anonymous visit to a garment factory in Bangladesh
After the Tazreen Fashions factory fire (2012) and the Rana Plaza collapse (2013), which killed 119 and 1,136 workers, respectively, the garment sector of Bangladesh has seen the…
Jeremy Morris: Cheesed off, but not because of sanctions: Russians adapt to immiseration as global capital increases its grip
With the constant, confusing, and often misinformed media noise around Russia, you would be forgiven for believing a number of unhelpfully distorting half-truths: that Russia has been a…
Nithya Natarajan: Behind the Indian Boom
“Behind the Indian Boom: Inequality and Resistance at the Heart of Economic Growth” is an exhibition curated by Alpa Shah and Simon Chambers, located in the Brunei Gallery…
Axel Rudi: Independence from Whom? The Aftermath of the Kurdish Referendum
In the future, people will say, “On the 16th of October, it happened again.” The Kurds were once again betrayed by the international community. Afraid of losing their…
Johan Fischer: Veg or non-veg? On fieldwork and food in India
Reporting from an ongoing fieldwork in Hyderabad, India, the central topic of this piece is the ways in which the vegetarian and the nonvegetarian are understood, practiced, and…
Soe Lin Aung: Three theses on the crisis in Rakhine
By now, the main contours of the recent events in Rakhine State, in western Myanmar, are well-known. On August 25, an insurgent group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya…
Joe Trapido: Breaking Rocks: Music, Ideology and Economic Collapse, from Paris to Kinshasa
Breaking Rocks is a volume of the Dislocations series published by Berghahn Books, a series closely associated with Focaal and FocaalBlog. The immense dislocations and suffering caused by…
Chris Hann: Hayek versus Polanyi in Montréal: Global society as markets, all the way across?
The workshop “Geographies of Markets”—hosted over three days in mid-June 2017 by the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University, Montréal—gave scholars from a wide range…
Petra Rethman: The German question: Solidarity, Lexit, nation
On 14 May 2017, in North Rhine-Westphalia’s (NRW) state (Bundesland) election, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won in emphatic fashion. Emphatic, here, does not express itself in numbers—33…
Focaal Volume 2017, Issue 78: Boredom after the global financial crisis
We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology has recently published and is available online at its new home, www.berghahnjournals.co…
World Refugee Day: Free articles from Berghahn Journals
The United Nations recognizes World Refugee Day annually on June 20 to raise awareness of and show support for the millions of refugees who have been forced to flee…
Alessandro Zagato: “Spokesperson for the people and candidate for the media”: An indigenous woman for the 2018 presidential elections in Mexico
María de Jesús Patricio, known as Marichuy, is an indigenous Nahuatl woman born on 23 December 1963 in Tuxpan (“land of rabbits”), a small town located in the…
Patrick Neveling: “Vote like humans”: Elections in a posthuman political economy
This post is part of a feature on the 2017 UK elections, moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (SOAS, University of London). As I left Bournemouth train station…
Michael Jennings: UK Election 2017 manifestos and international development: Common ground and clear water
This post is part of a feature on the 2017 UK elections, moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bern). With the election coming up today, I…