Didier Fassin Research Articles

면역성과 취약성의 교차적 관점에서 본 코로나19 팬데믹 이후 생명/삶의 정치

This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic through the lenses of immunity and vulnerability, delving into contemporary biopolitics and its social and political ramifications. The pandemic has not only been a public health crisis but has also exposed and intensified socio-political and economic inequalities, underlining vulnerabilities associated with neoliberal globalization and biomedicalization. Neoliberal policies have weakened public health systems and exacerbated health inequalities, resulting in an immune crisis that has accelerated the spread of COVID-19. Drawing on the theories of Roberto Esposito, Judith Butler, Henk ten Have, and Didier Fassin, this paper reinterprets the intersection of immunity and vulnerability, highlighting the negative biopolitics triggered by the crisis and exploring the potential for a shift toward affirmative biopolitics. By leveraging the interconstitutive approach of modern immunology, it proposes moving beyond traditional self-defense-based concepts of immunity towards a new direction for affirmative biopolitics. This new approach aims to foster social solidarity and community formation in the post-pandemic world, advocating for an inclusive and interdependent “politics of life” that acknowledges and embraces human vulnerability.

Undoing Aid: UK Aid Cuts, Development Relationships and Resourcing Futures in Malawi

ABSTRACTThe decision of the United Kingdom government to reduce its Official Development Assistance by £ 4.6 billion in 2020 was framed by its proponents as a nationalist response to a domestic financial crisis. This Conservative‐led austerity measure triggered the early closure of hundreds of aid projects globally. Concerned British politicians equated the cuts to moral failures as humanitarian and civil society actors claimed the lost funding would devastate the world's most vulnerable populations. In the vast space between British funders and the so‐called ‘beneficiaries’ of aid is a diverse cadre of mid‐level actors ‘doing’ and, in this case, ‘un‐doing’ development programming. This article examines their experiences in prematurely closing British‐funded projects in one postcolonial context, Malawi. Drawing upon semi‐structured interviews, the article explores the emotional, material and relational consequences of austerity. It builds on Didier Fassin's theorization of moral economies to argue that the timing and approach of this funding withdrawal violated the accepted moral economies of aid, breaching obligations between Malawian mid‐level aid workers and community members (including family) as well as among institutions. It concludes by considering how this particular rupture to the relational infrastructure of aid has prompted demands for recalibrated resourcing futures in Malawi.

Chakachua Pharmaceuticals and Fugitive Science.

Chakachua Pharmaceuticals and Fugitive Science.

The Remnants of Sense

The Remnants of Sense Alastair Morgan, PhD (bio) In an interview outlining her approach to understanding mental distress, Lucy Johnstone states that when faced with ostensibly bizarre, irrational or distressing experiences: [T]he guiding principle of "At some level it all makes sense" applies. In fact, I can't immediately think of anyone I've worked with for whom it did not, in the end, turn out to be true.1 The two commentaries on my paper point to two levels where this sense-making might operate; a structural and an individual level. Havi Carel (2023) draws attention to the important concept of power in the Power Threat Meaning Framework and suggests a widening of the concept of threat to a concept of vulnerabilization that refers to the multiple factors that expose people to institutional neglect and violence that is interlaced with a range of forms of discrimination, neglect and disadvantage. Whilst the main strength of the PTMF approach is to draw attention to the structural importance of power in contributing to forms of psychic distress, the emphasis on a concept of threat tends towards a reactive and reductive concept of power. Carel (2023) helpfully points to a wider concept of power that can be utilised for further work in understanding the impact of societal violence on forms of mental distress. Such a widening of the concept of power does not only rest on a critique of institutions but also an understanding of the ways in which people can be abandoned and neglected by state support of one kind or another. Power operates through a dual logic of exposure and abandonment. Some people are particularly exposed to forms of institutional power from an early age and vulnerabilized by such exposure, but there is also a logic of abandonment within such exposure; the ever present possibility of neglect. Such an operation of power is not univocal (or embedded in one profession) but dispersed and differentially applied. As Didier Fassin (2018, p. 43) writes: "All lives are precarious but certain lives much more so than others—and above all, quite differently." Psychiatric power is one important focus when trying to understand this process of the exposure and abandonment of power, however, as Carel (2023, p. 75) notes, "the medical realm is not its own kingdom." Psychiatry is inserted into a network of dispersed power that has multiple and differential effects, both positive and negative. The focus on the question of psychiatric diagnosis as the apotheosis of societal power neglects the multiple effects of diagnosis or the lack of diagnosis on people who are particularly vulnerable to the operations of power. In situations where institutional care is crumbling and under-resourced the focus on psychiatric care alone as a problem of power risks just compounding such an institutional neglect. [End Page 77] Veena Das (2020) asks the question of what happens before the arrival of the psychiatrist on the scene of care and after her disappearance. Das (2020, p. 174) is interested in the multiple ways that power flows across and between both formal and informal institutions to produce a "milieu of madness." Such flows of power will also apply to increasingly hegemonic psychological formulations of signs of distress as problems in living, as problems in adaptive reactions to adversity. Such formulations are themselves inserted into a nexus of power relations and processes of vulnerabilization and are not somehow free of the taint of other forms of understanding. Indeed, as Carel notes, the process of demedicalization and de-professionalisation can very easily be inserted into the dual logic of exposure and abandonment that I discussed earlier. People can be exposed to power in a wider range of settings as psychic distress is demedicalized but also subjected to abandonment and neglect as mental distress is no longer thought of as an illness but just one of many wider and non-medical problems in living that does not require state support. The structural account of the determinants of mental distress offers an important corrective to individualised and medicalised approaches to meaning, but doesn't completely erase the problem of understanding and interpreting mental distress. Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed's commentary raises important issues with the...

Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire By Laura Edmondson

Reviewed by: Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson Sky Herington Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire BY LAURA EDMONDSON Indiana UP, 2018. xii + 348 pp. ISBN 9780253032478 paper. In the context of an ever-expanding humanitarian sector, particularly active in Africa, scholarship interrogating the ethics and effects of arts-based therapeutic models in humanitarian interventions has increasingly turned to performance as both a fruitful object and an important tool of study. In Performing Trauma in Central Africa, Laura Edmondson develops this approach, drawing on performance theory in a compelling analysis of a variety of cultural responses to mass violence and trauma in the Great Lakes region over the last two decades. Borrowing from Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, Edmondson uses an "empire of trauma" (5) as a lens that reveals the limiting master-narratives of suffering and healing that are regularly perpetuated by Western-sponsored arts interventions. Scrutinizing neoliberal solutions to managing the aftermath of conflict, she investigates how Central African trauma is packaged to "obscure rather than to illuminate empire's complicity in a world order that sustains mass death and systemic violence" (9) and is made to soothe and satiate empire's appetites. If local artistic expression is prone to manipulation and co-option by both INGOs and African states, however, empire's trauma market is not a straightforward vampirization of African suffering by the imperial consumer. Performance is a site through which local actors might legitimate such narratives but also, simultaneously, reappropriate them for their own ends: in contexts of scarcity, trauma narratives can serve as vital resources. The historical overview of the region in the first chapter immediately reveals the advantages of Edmondson's geographical focus, which allows room for a detailed presentation of the specificities of each country's history while also establishing, through a transnational approach, the interconnectedness of conflicts across the region. Mapping the "roots and routes" (38) of mass violence and genocide, Edmondson analyzes the concept of "competitive memory" (59) and considers how a single mass trauma might overshadow others in the public imagination, creating a hierarchy of suffering. The following four chapters offer a wide range of case studies of the cultural production that has emerged from these intersecting histories of violence in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Fieldwork in 2004 at a US-sponsored rehabilitation center for former child soldiers in northern Uganda, for example, informs Edmondson's reflections on the constructed linear narratives of these children's experiences, performed as spectacle for the benefit of foreign visitors. The exploration of the Western consumption of spectacle is then expanded in an examination of the performative strategies of the post-genocide Rwandan state, while in the Congolese context interventions by American humanitarian organizations are seen to shrink spaces of suffering and eclipse the trauma of those excluded from victim groups recognized on the world stage. Finally, Edmondson returns to a post-conflict northern Uganda in 2010 and reflects on the role of INGOs and American celebrities in the complex dynamics of trauma branding. Such branding projects are however sidestepped by many [End Page 193] northern Ugandans in their use of memorialization and demands on the state for "living memorials" (252) that respond to their material needs. A different approach is taken in the book's final chapter in which, drawing on her own experience running theater workshops in northern Uganda and Rwanda, Edmondson searches for new models of theater activism detached from its "humanitarian baggage" (287). Since, she argues, "neoliberal pressures are more easily negotiated than opposed" (271), staying at home is not an option. Instead she seeks to offer Western theater activists a guide to avoiding those pitfalls of empire discussed in the preceding chapters and tentatively concludes, borrowing from Emmanuel Lévinas, that a stance of "radical passivity" (276)—involving shared vulnerability, open-ended collaboration, and the acceptation of inaction—might be a useful, if sometimes elusive, point of departure from which to develop a more ethical approach to intercultural performance outside of the influence of empire. This explicit identification of an imagined reader in the closing pages echoes the emphasis on the perspectives of Western agents found...

Ethical turn in the social sciences

AbstractThis paper discusses the ethical or moral turn of the social sciences, especially in sociology in the works of Zygmunt Bauman and in anthropology in the works of Didier Fassin. These scholars have embarked on relating morals or ethics to their particular area of specialization. We note that their contributions have highlighted the moral or ethical questions in their respective field works and empirical observations and have produced moral or ethical discourses or frameworks in their respective area or field. Ethics or morality (sometimes) morals is not just a theory but also practice in their respective disciplines and advocacies. This moral or ethical practice is translated into questioning our cognitive frameworks and political consequences of globalization or consumerism affecting some groups or individuals in contemporary world. We shall consider morality as human actions while ethics is the reflections on those actions.

The Society to Come

La Société qui vient [The Society to Come], a book edited by Princeton professor and current holder of the Chair of Public Health at the Collège de France, Didier Fassin, cannot be accused of sinning by modesty. This is a collective work of more than 1300 pages, grouped in seven parts and comprising no fewer than 64 chapters. Each chapter is devoted to a fundamental question of our present time and is written by an author who is an expert in her or his domain or field of research. Each of the first six parts deals with a set of broad themes of general interest: ‘challenges ( enjeux), policies, worlds, inequalities, recognition and exploitation’. A seventh, final, and non-thematic part is free of a prior theme and is composed of non-French authors.

Conceptualizing the After-Crisis through Ethnographies of Postcrisis Situations in Africa

Conceptualizing the After-Crisis through Ethnographies of Postcrisis Situations in Africa1 Maarten Bedert (bio), Astrid Bochow (bio), and Rijk van Dijk (bio) Introduction Many scholars have been exploring the local effects of global responses to extensive humanitarian crises on the African continent—for example, crises resulting from natural disasters, such as drought (De Waal 2005), violent conflict (Abramowitz 2014), and epidemics (Nguyen 2010). The socioeconomic and political effects of interventions by international organizations have been studied ethnographically by looking at how new structures, resources, knowledge, and expertise have been introduced in local contexts (Beckmann, Gusman, and Shroff 2014; Bedert 2020; Duffield 2002; Smernoff 2013; Turner 2004). An often overlooked question is: what happens when the crisis has ended? As international interventions wind down, they leave behind certain material and immaterial infrastructures, including structures of knowledge and labor.2 Even though, commonly, these are intended to last for the duration of the crisis, new crises often emerge as support is withdrawn and these infrastructures dwindle or are used in new and different ways. This contribution aims to conceptualize the notion of postcrisis as it reflects critical junctures and disjunctures (Vigh 2008) that, in these terms, must be unpacked analytically. Rather than the end of crisis and a presumed return to normalcy, we consider a transmutation of crisis that often emerges in the new situation. The postcrisis can signal a number of processes by which it reappears in a different fashion, based on different modalities and conditions, or creates a new crisis, leading to different effects for distinct groups in society. While a crisis may be solved for one group, it may resurface for yet another group. This transmutation, we argue, needs to be analyzed as a postcrisis crisis. As Reinhart Koselleck points out, the term crisis derives from the Greek word krisis (judgment, decision) and is often translated as “turning point” (Koselleck 2006, 358; Roitman 2017). Therefore, crises are thought of as moments of a distinct, albeit short, temporal condition. Many people [End Page 1] associate crisis with an experience of temporary abnormality (Vigh 2008, 7) in contexts of war, violence, bereavement, disease, or any other life-threatening situation. In recent years, anthropologists working on epidemics, civil unrest or war, poverty, and hunger have pointed at the chronicity of crisis (Vigh 2008), or a “routinization of emergency,” as Didier Fassin (2012, 183) did—meaning that, for many people, these life-threatening situations are ongoing, and people have no experience of what it means to live under secure, safe, and comfortable living conditions. Regarding the continuity of a crisis, many authors point at what can be called the construction or the proclamation of crisis by media and politics, thereby seeing this as a political tool, which supports certain power structures and weakens others (Agamben 2005; Calhoun 2010; Fassin 2012; Fassin and Panadolfi 2010; Nguyen 2009; Roitman 2014). Also, regarding the COVID-19 crisis,3 Giorgio Agamben has remarked on how the Italian government has used the virus to call a state of exception. Far from being a new phenomenon, the state of exception has become the new normal. The rhetoric of a sense of emergency ultimately leads, in Agamben’s eyes, to a context in which restrictions are gradually reducing life to the purely biological (Agamben 1998). Janet Roitman (2014) elaborates on the way a crisis is constructed as an object of knowledge. She argues that crisis is a narrative device, through which a particular and exceptional social, economic, and political reality is invoked while others are denied or ignored. Others describe infrastructures that have been put in place by diverse actors, such as governments, international organizations, and local NGOs, and describe the effects that these, often temporary, infrastructures have on local economies, job markets, housing arrangements, medical care, and the management of livelihoods (McKay 2017). An ethnographic approach to the lived experience of postcrisis situations might provide new insights into crisis as a sociopolitical project (see also Visacovsky 2017), which seems to favor the temporality of crisis as it intersects with normality but falls short when accounting for the aftermath of this political invocation. The contributions in this special issue offer ethnographic explorations that question what happens when the exceptional...

The Punishment Theories Do, or How to Do Punishment with Theories (Fassin’sThe Will to Punish)

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Review ForumThe Punishment Theories Do, or How to Do Punishment with Theories (Fassin’s The Will to Punish) The Will to Punish. By Didier Fassin, with commentaries by Bruce Western, Rebecca M. McLennan, and David W. Garland. Edited and introduced by Christopher Kutz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.Karina BiondiKarina BiondiDepartment of Social Sciences, State University of Maranhão, Cidade Universitária Paulo VI, Avenida Lourenço Vieira da Silva 1000, Jardim São Cristóvão, CEP 65055-310, São Luís, Maranhão, Brazil ([email protected]). Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 63, Number 2April 2022 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719786 Views: 68Total views on this site HistoryAccepted March 07, 2022 © 2022 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

The ‘Cultures’ of Global Mental Health

Global Mental Health is a field of research and practice that addresses the expansion of universal and equitable mental health care worldwide. This article explores the ways the concept of culture is employed in Global Mental Health literature. Global Mental Health advocates and critics assume an ontological separation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ to typify mental illness, linking it predominantly to one or the other of these two categories. Advocates of Global Mental Health view mental disorders as a nature–culture hybrid, while critics see them as typically cultural phenomena. The cultural critique of Global Mental Health can be strengthened by a sociological approach to both the role of critique and the uses of the concept of culture within social sciences. As an alternative to the ontologization of culture, we propose a different theoretical approach to the social issues involved in the expansion of international public health care in mental health: Arthur Kleinman's and Didier Fassin’s moral anthropological approaches.

RESENTMENT – EXCAVATING A RESURGENT PHENOMENON IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Resentment is a powerful human emotion that has both private and social dimensions where it manifests in a variety of ways. It has been identified as the force behind uprisings against racial, economic, and political inequality and injustice throughout time, as well as in the contemporary scene. Its moral and socio-political implications have been reflected on ever since Nietzsche identified it as a major contributing factor in the genealogy of morality. Max Scheler made a brilliant phenomenological analysis of it, and Francis Fukuyama recently identified it as a significant force in shaping contemporary identity politics. It has become a significant political force in contemporary South Africa, where the politics of reconciliation have largely been displaced by the politics of resentment. Although it has generally been viewed as having negative consequences for the social compact, its moral justification in specific circumstances has been powerfully made by the holocaust survivor Jean Amery and more recently by Didier Fassin with regard to post-apartheid South Africa. However, it is often accompanied by what Nietzsche called the “falsification of the tablets of value”, which also means that it may lead to alternative mental constructions of reality that might result in delusional perspectives that can have dire social and moral consequences.

For a Right to Health Beyond Biopolitics: The Politics of Pandemic and the ‘Politics of Life’

We argue, drawing on the work of Didier Fassin, that the right to health can be understood as an essential part of a radical politics of life. Since the right to health implies fostering the well-being of individuals in a way that is structural, progressive and non-discriminatory, the right not only problematises the ‘governmentality’ approach to power but allows push-back against statist and market discourses through a specific phenomenology of right. The discourse of rights – like the pandemic itself – oscillates between general and particular in a way that makes normative responses unstable. Nonetheless it is this dialectic that is characteristic of human rights discourse and allows a right to health to be the proper response to pandemic without it being subsumed within neoliberal logic. A politics of life is a multi-focussed analysis of life, health and society potentially resisting the appropriation of biological life by neoliberalism.

Pacifist utopias: humanitarianism, tragedy and complicity in the Second World War

Pacifist utopias: humanitarianism, tragedy and complicity in the Second World War

A conditional norm: chemical warfare from colonialism to contemporary civil wars

The norm against chemical weapons (CW) is considered to be a strong and universal restraint against poisonous methods of warfare. Yet the repeated CW attacks during the Syrian civil war have raised questions about the robustness of this international norm. Under what conditions do third parties emphatically sanction violators of the norm? Adopting a historical approach, we analyse the discursive and contextual dynamics characterising the CW attacks since the early twentieth century. Employing process tracing, we consult a variety of rich archival resources including primary language documents to study a number of historical cases including late colonial wars during the interwar period, and Middle Eastern civil wars since the late twentieth century. Building on Judith Butler’s distinction of grievable and ungrievable lives and Didier Fassin’s notion of politics of life, we argue that the anti-CW norm has never had universal status and always remained conditional on a hierarchy of victims. CW attacks targeting certain groups have been more readily justifiable and generated ineffective and inconsistent third-party reactions. Consequently, certain groups, who are implicitly or explicitly perceived to be outside the pale of civilised order, remain more vulnerable to CW attacks than others.

Moral anthropology

The anthropology of morality continues to be met with resistance. Opposition rests on the perception that one cannot study morals without moralizing or advocating which makes it both epistemologically and professionally questionable. This blinkered view towards the objectives of moral anthropology ignores the differences in approaches which need to be considered if epistemic integrity is the real issue. Since most criticisms are aimed at Didier Fassin and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, I argue that the issue is political and that this singling out of their work raises its own set of questions regarding professional ethics. With reference to my own work and others who focus on embodied moralities, I will show that neither moralizing nor advocating are an inevitable consequence of this approach and that the study of morals has genuine ethnographic value.

Public Policies in Favelas and the Production of Urban Inequalities in Rio De Janeiro

In the past three decades, we have witnessed the worldwide development of new economic dynamics that have intensified the most perverse and harmful effects of globalization processes. The global economy has increasingly produced intense social vulnerability and has driven a large number of people out of the center of the economic and social order (Sassen, 2016). This economic model responds to a logic of financialization of all domains of social life, imposed by different political choices and decisions that result in the degradation of working conditions and the increase of precariousness and insecurity throughout the world (Harvey, 1985). These consequences are not new and have already been described and analyzed by authors such as Serge Paugam (1991), Robert Castel (1995), and Didier Fassin (1996), among others. However, as Saskia Sassen (2016) points out, in a broader sense, this logic of financialization and production of new inequalities underway in the contemporary world can be seen as a more profound systemic underlying tendency that articulates realities that unite us. They often seem disconnected, and their modes of action, which can be characterized by their complexity, may include different dynamics and even coexist with economic growth.

Didier Fassin, Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition

As with his previous works, Didier Fassin deploys a critical ethnography in Prison Worlds, which is informed by anthropology, sociology and history. As a result, his use of the social sciences is a continuing invitation to incorporate various scales of observation and levels of analysis. What is, in fact, the carceral condition in France at the start of the 21st century? It is first and foremost a prison that is overpopulated, particularly since it serves as a detention facility, “sheltering”...

The imaginary as method. “Lyrical sociology” as a heuristic of sociological description

The article draws on recent debates about empirical sociology’s lack of imagination in order to champion the strength and virtue of a peculiar type of close, but also thin description as a central mode of social scientific observation. A case in point for the evocation of a descriptive sociology is Andrew Abbott’s neologism lyrical sociology. Examining the lyrical-sociological approach, the article claims that the concept presents a distinct heuristic for the elicitation of a more colorful and vivid sociological imagination, namely, an emotional imagination in the empirical toolbox of the descriptive sociologist. After the article considers the potential of description as a specific type of sociological representation and thus discusses the concept of the social imaginary from a methodological point of departure, the article suggests three vantage points to qualify the lyrical mode as a sociological descriptive: First, it presents its central properties, thereby referring to the notion of a so-called “descriptive turn”; second, it examines the heuristic value of lyrical sociology. And third, the article juxtaposes lyrical sociology and the compelling work of French-American anthropologist Didier Fassin to evaluate the potential but also the limits of lyricism within the sociological craft.

Law and Refugee Crises

Refugees have an increasing global significance, as their numbers continue to grow and the nature of displacement continues to evolve. Different international, state, and local laws and policies play a part in refugee crises. On the one hand, then, it is important to theorize the role of the law in shaping different formations of displacement; on the other, it is also crucial to address how the people involved in these crises (government officials, street-level bureaucrats, forced migrants, and receiving populations) engage with the law. We highlight and develop three areas of sociolegal inquiry that can push forward the study of the law and politics of refuge: ( a) the uneven geography shaping the global humanitarian machine; ( b) the local contexts within which such a machine operates, interacting with different actors’ conceptualizations of justice; and ( c) the distinct dilemmas that the urban environment poses to both refugees and humanitarians. Advancing these areas of sociolegal inquiry requires enriching established theoretical sources in refugee studies with both neglected ones, such as postcolonial theory and Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of forced displacement, and newer ones, such as Didier Fassin's anthropology of morality and pragmatic sociology of ordinary judgments of fairness.