A política de contratação de professores temporários na rede municipal de ensino de Cametá (Pará, Brasil, 2013-2020)

This paper aims to analyze the temporary teachers’ hiring policy in Cametá, during the last two municipal administrations (2013–2020). The main focus is the interface between disputes for local power and the municipal administration of education. This is a case study using a qualitative approach, employing the procedures of documental analysis, interviews, participant observation, and a survey for data collection. Our theoretical framework was based on understandings from the anthropology of politics, with the concept of clientelism as the central analytical category. Moreover, we draw from literature that centers research done from a municipal perspective. The results indicate that the practice of hiring temporary teachers occurs mainly in schools in the rural area, being based on clientelist relationships. Several actors are involved in the hiring process and these clientelist relationships, with emphasis on city council members, school principals, and temporary teachers. Furthermore, the precarization of the labor of temporary teachers was observed, with recurring delayed salaries and months worked without payment. The performance of the public prosecutor’s office proved to be insufficient in a scenario of non-compliance with the legal framework that regulates the teaching profession in the Brazilian education system.

Reassembling Energy Policy

Ongoing debates about the need to deeply transform energy systems worldwide have spurred renewed scholarly interest in the role of future-visions and foreknowledge in energy policy. Forecasts and scenarios are in fact ubiquitous in energy debates: commonly calculated using energy models, they are employed by governments, administrations and civil society actors to identify problems, choose between potential solutions, and justify specific forms of political intervention. This article contributes to these debates through a historic study of foreknowledge-making – modelling, forecasting, and scenario-building – and its relationship to the structuring of ‘energy policy’ as an autonomous policy domain in France and Germany. It brings together two strands of literature: work in the anthropology of politics on ‘policy assemblages’, and STS research on the ‘performative’ effects of foreknowledge. The main argument is that new ways of assembling energy systems in energy modelling, and of bringing together policy networks in scenario-building and forecasting exercises, can contribute to policy change. To analyse the conditions under which such change occurs, the article focuses on two periods: the making of national energy policies as ‘energy supply policies’ in the post-war decades; and challenges to dominant approaches to energy policy and energy modelling in the 1970s and 1980s. It concludes by arguing that further research should not only focus on the effects of foreknowledge on expectations and beliefs (‘discursive performativity’), but also take into account how new models ‘equip’ political, administrative and market actors (‘material performativity’), and how forecasting practices recompose and shape wider policy worlds (‘social performativity’).

Politics, Interrupted

Against the suggestion that we are living in ‘post-political’ times, I argue that the capacity for critical politics is permanent and broadly distributed, as it emerges from the contradictions embedded in our everyday lives. Yet collective mobilisation to change prevailing power formations is not common. Ethnographers are well positioned to explain why this is so, by investigating critique at its incipient stage, when it may be mute or incoherent, and examining how it develops into a world-changing force or—more often—how the emergence of such a force is interrupted. Posing the trajectory towards historically effective politics as counter-factual (something we might expect to find), and attending to how such a trajectory is interrupted, offers a useful point of entry for ethnographic research. Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall, I propose a set of questions that could help guide a renewed anthropology of politics along these lines: (1) What is the formation of power that creates a sense of unease, or separation? (2) Through what practices is critique shared or enunciated? (3) What is the social group that connects to this critique? (4) In what ways does a group thus assembled act to change the configuration of power it has identified as problematic? Following the logic of the counterfactual: (5) What potential or embryonic critiques are not articulated, (6) do not form the basis for connection and mobilisation, or (7) do not make new worlds? Finally: (8) What are the formations, practices, and affective states that sustain and stabilise the status quo? In the second part of my essay I use these questions to probe practices of politics in three sites in rural Indonesia where I have carried out research.

Anthropology of power: Beyond state-centric politics

Since the labeling of the ‘anthropology of politics’ in the mid-20th century, the discipline has changed in multiple ways. Anthropology moved from state-centric politics (in the forms of state, stateless, anti-state or alter-state notions) to wider and contradictory realms of configurations of power, and the ways in which power works out day-by-day. A per- spective on power entails a privileged ethnographic focus on everyday differentiation, contradiction and struggle in the making of social organization, as well as in arrangements and disputes over the labor of categorizing (or grassroots philosophical work) invested in these processes. In this article, and in light of these concerns, I ask if anthropologists could reframe some questions that have been present since the very foundation of modern social sciences.

Political Anthropology and Anthropology of Politics: An Overview

In this short review, I have tried to sketch an overview of historical development of political anthropology and its recent trends. I was enthused to prepare this review article as there does not exist any of such simplified introduction of one of the prominent sub-fields in cultural anthropology for the Nepalis readers, in particular. I believe this particular sub-field has to offer much to understand and explain the recent trends and current turmoil of the political transition in the country. Political anthropologists than any other could better explain how the politics is socially and culturally embedded and intertwined, therefore, separation of the two – politics from social and cultural processes – is not only impossible but methodologically wrong, too. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/dsaj.v5i0.6365 Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 5, 2011: 217-34