ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on the complex understandings of politics, agency, and power that materialize the “political” in “political anthropology” during the period of neoliberal globalization, with its porous borders, fragmented fields, and compromised forms of sovereignty. In particular, he consider literature that explores how the globalization of neoliberal forms is understood in ethnographies that focus on the experiences of individuals and groups who are grappling with its effects. The debate in legal and political anthropology about the primacy of cultural logics over political process, what Justin Richland refers to as an excessive “ ‘focus on mentalities’ ” (whether neoliberal or otherwise), is a variant of a much broader debate with deep roots in social and political theory. Just as a neoliberal legal culture produces gaps that both secure and undermine its hegemony, so the production of identity as a dimension of a neoliberal economy incorporates difference (nonidentity) that both troubles identity and secures its completion.
