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This article examines one informant's approach to the relationship between ideological concepts and political power. I argue that ideological representation must be understood on its own terms, rather than within a larger theory of discourse. I point toward three key qualities of every encounter with ideological representation: subjectivity, discontinuity, and commitment. The fieldwork on which this article is based occurred in Berlin, Germany, during the fall 2014. During this period, my research focused on activists committed to overturning the sanctioning policy (Sanktionspolitik), which allows case managers to dock the unemployment benefits of their clients. [ideology, subjectivity, welfare state, Germany]
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In this article, I apply Alain Badiou's theory of the event to make sense of the beliefs of an anti-sanction activist in Germany. Sanctions are deductions to unemployment benefits imposed by jobs counselors on their unemployed clients. Ethnographic research with Renate shows how her beliefs about the welfare state and her own personal life are examined by her as conditions for the abolition of sanctions in Germany, which is considered here as an event within Badiou’s ontological framework.
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In this article, I examine the statements and actions of two key informants, both of whom direct welfare programs in a district of the former East Berlin. I argue that this evidence points to a particular modality of political rationalization, which I dub organizational discourse. The entanglement of organizational discourse and governmentality are explored, as is the place of organizational discourse within both the liberal welfare state and the bygone state socialist regime.
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Use-value and exchange-value are pragmatic features of commodity exchange which are apparent from the careful study of specific interactions, as well as from the viewpoint of economic processes at large. While Marx's well-known attempt to describe this pair of concepts in Capital (2001) takes the latter tack, I attempt here to take the formeri.e., to approach the composition of the commodity from the point of view of the pragmatics of interaction. In doing so, I offer a semiotic model of the valuation of commodities which differs from accounts given by Kockelman (2006) and Agha (2011). The ethnographic object at stake in this essay is StreetWise, a Chicago street newspaper said to have empowering effects on its vendors.
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"Inequality is currently gaining considerable attention in academic, policy, and media circles. From Thomas Piketty to Robert Putnam, there is no shortage of economic, sociological, or political analyses. But what does anthropology, with its focus on the qualitative character of relationships between people, have to offer? Drawing on current scholarship and illustrative ethnographic case studies, McGill argues that anthropology is particularly well suited to interrogating global inequality, not just within nations, but across nations as well. The book is designed to be used flexibly in a variety of undergraduate classes--from introductory cultural anthropology, to courses on globalization, economic and political anthropology, and inequality. Brief, accessibly written, and peppered with vivid ethnographic examples that bring contemporary research to life, Global Inequality is a unique offering for undergraduate anthropology courses."--
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