The “awkwardnesses” of aid and exchange

Self-help and mutual aid have been at the heart of the consumer cooperative movement and its response to food insecurity since its inception. Yet how these terms are conceptualized and practiced in contemporary food co-ops often has more to do with their individual histories, ideologies, and the values of those involved than it does the history of the cooperative movement. Drawing on ethnographic examples from two London-based food co-ops with different backgrounds, this article explores how each enacts ideals of aid and exchange. It argues that the context of austerity creates “awkwardnesses” between and within personal values and organizational structures in the face of inequality, leading to blurred boundaries between different models of aid and exchange and the forms of moral accounting that these entail.

Denunciations of dependence

This article focuses on workers in a South African township who enter into relationships of hierarchical dependence due to a lack of alternatives in the context of high unemployment and neoliberal fiscal restraint. The relationships are characterized by a double bind: workers seek relations of dependence in order to be recognized as persons, yet within these relations they are often denied such recognition, which reproduces experiences of infantilization, paternalism, and dehumanization associated with the past. The article explores how racialized and gendered meanings condition how men and women navigate relationships of hierarchical dependence, what they can expect to get from them and how these bonds can potentially be drawn on in efforts to escape them.

In/ter/dependence: An afterword

Our closing reflection on the collection of articles in this issue argues that the modernist bourgeois figure of the autonomous individual, founded from the first on a Promethean fiction, has long hidden the sorts of dependencies, interdependencies, and intradependencies intrinsic to social life everywhere. This is all the more so in the twenty-first century, under conditions in which the relations between capital and labor, patterns of sociality and social reproduction, and Euromodernity itself are undergoing wide-ranging changes, changes that are deepening the tensile coexistence of human autonomy and entanglement.

Imagined individuality

If no man is an island, if we are inherently social creatures, how should we understand people’s claims to be valuable individuals, separate from their environment? Based on ethnographic research among self-employed Cuban market traders, this article analyses performances of imagined individuality to understand how people cultivate a notion of themselves as separate from social ties. In Cuba, work in the growing private sector provides a foundation upon which people assert personal independence. In order to cultivate and realize these notions of individuality, one needs to fulfill gendered expectations of material distribution. Hence, to assert personal independence requires the mobilization of unequally distributed resources.

The Janus face of austerity politics

How is social reproduction possible in a context of precarious employment and austerity policies that have defunded welfare? The paradox of autonomy and dependence is present in intergenerational relations of support and conflict at various scales. It emerges, on the one hand, in the neoliberal injunction to be individually responsible for one’s own present and future wellbeing, an aspiration that is impossible to fulfill. On the other hand, it is expressed in the increasing recourse by younger active cohorts to the care work and assets of their older kin—in particular retirement pensions and a home. Finally, policy calls to transform the pension system oppose younger and older generations in the accountings of social security financial sustainability and question the fairness of existing public pension schemes.

The bystander and the passerby

Berlant, Lauren and Kathleen Stewart. 2019. The hundreds. Durham: Duke University Press.Pandian, Anand and Stuart McLean, eds. 2017. Crumpled paper boat: Experiments in ethnographic writing. Durham: Duke University Press.

Battlegrounds of dependence

Interdependence is a fundamental characteristic of human existence. The way in which certain dependencies are acknowledged as opposed to those that are hidden, or the ways in which some are validated while others are denigrated, is central to how social inequalities are reproduced and recreated. In this introduction we explore how particular dependencies are categorized, separated, and made visible or invisible as part of their performative effect. In particular, we explore the distinction between wage labor and kinship as two forms of relatedness that are often separated in terms of the (in)dependence that they are seen to embody. Even though they are practically entangled, their conceptual separation remains important. These conceptual separations are central to how gender difference is imagined and constituted globally.

“I am a dead woman”

HIV/AIDS can be understood as “an epidemic of signification” (Treichler 1987) not only about dangerous sexuality but also about dangerous relations of dependence. I begin by examining newspaper articles and nongovernmental organization reports to show how they pose alarmist questions about AIDS-related dependency, such as who will care for “AIDS orphans” and how will labor deficits be managed. I then turn to the Papua New Guinea context and focus on the experiences of women living with HIV who oft en narrate themselves as embodying state dependencies on foreign aid for their antiretroviral medications. In contrast, they typically resist their kin’s attempts to position them as wayward dependents who should be grateful for being given food and shelter.

A mother’s hope in the midst of existential immobility from state and stigma

The article is situated ethnographically in households on the main social housing estate in Harpurhey, North Manchester, England. It explores the affective dynamics of motherhood and imaginations of the future with a backdrop of prolonged government disinvestment. We follow the experiences of a mother and her son as they deal with moments of uncertainty and attempt to imagine and prepare for his future free from dependence on state welfare. Considering that parenting marks time in the most intimate of ways and it confronts parents with the passing of time in terms of biological “growth” that sequences time for us, this article addresses how and at what points dependence on the state, over time, reconfigures the affective dynamics of motherhood and imaginations of familial dependencies into the future.

Desired formality

Formal work is essential to gain legal residence in Chile and the reason why Latin American and Caribbean migrants purchase fake contracts on the black market. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with migrant Haitian women applying for work visas in Santiago, this article explores the effects of desired formality and its promises of a good life on contemporary statehood in Chile. The analysis shows how Haitian women’s efforts to become formal workers transform their experiences as racialized and gendered migrants in Chile, and impact how state institutions manage and control migration. Desired formality reveals the paradoxical character of state policies that help create a racialized and precarious labor force within its legal frameworks and explain why migrants attach themselves to fragile good-life projects in new countries.