Aaron Ansell | Virginia Tech (original) (raw)

Papers by Aaron Ansell

Revista de Antropologia da UFSCar, 2015

Este artigo argumenta que certas influências liberais advindas das políticas públicas recentes tê... more Este artigo argumenta que certas influências liberais advindas das políticas públicas recentes têm transformado a subjetividade política dos sertanejos piauienses. Esse povo mostra uma ambivalência perante o liberalismo. De um lado, a reformulação de gêneros locais de discurso político manifesta a internalização da crítica liberal do clientelismo político. Do outro lado, o engajamento do povo com os políticos durante as emergências de saúde sugere que o liberalismo inspira certas ansiedades perante a vida genérica dentro de um contexto de vida precária.

Journal of Anthropological Research, 2018

On Calling Donald Trump "Corrupt", 2022

This chapter advances an unconventional model of corruption both to understand disturbing feature... more This chapter advances an unconventional model of corruption both to understand disturbing features of Donald Trump’s political career and to explore the risks of using the term “corrupt” as a pejorative label for Trump. Here corruption refers to the transfer of value from higher to lower positions along a moral gradient through a violation of the sacred. Curiously, Trump himself celebrates his sacrilegious transfer of value from the “elite” to those supposedly ordinary people positioned at the bottom (the so-called Deplorables) of a moral gradient identified with “The Establishment.” Therefore, adversarial assertions of Trump’s corruption risk affirming the modes of agency he arrogates to himself. More specifically, they risk testifying to his successful transfer of (mostly symbolic) value through a set of three tactics—excitation, transduction, and shunting—explored in the chapter.

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2021

Liberalism follows a grammar when representing voluntary social relationships that involve some e... more Liberalism follows a grammar when representing voluntary social relationships that involve some element of exchange; it reduces them to relations of pure exchange. This paper examines the transmission of this grammar across cultural lines, from the progressive officials comprising Brazil's Workers' Party government (2003-2016) to the inhabitants of the country's northeastern backlands (sertão) whose 'clientelistic' politics the officials sought to dismantle. By analysing sertanejos' abandonment of the once-common practice of displaying campaign propaganda on their homes, I hope to explain the political implications of the spread of this grammatical logic-what I call the reductio ad cambitas-to a people who have long embedded political transactions within elector-politician 'friendships'.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2021

This article offers an ethnographic comparison of two genres of waiting for healthcare in Northea... more This article offers an ethnographic comparison of two genres of waiting for healthcare in Northeast Brazil in order to explain the persistence of patron-client practices at a time when people otherwise reject patronage. The explanation turns on a recasting of patronage as a form of sovereignty whereby politicians and afflicted persons may choose to suspend the emerging rights-based care regime in favour of older patronage-based approaches to care. Motivating such decisions is the afflicted person's experience of the wait for rights-based healthcare as a form of 'bare life', an experience they hope to escape.

Oxford Bibliographies, 2019

Anthropology has long had a love-hate relationship to liberalism. As the disciplinary proponents ... more Anthropology has long had a love-hate relationship to liberalism. As the disciplinary proponents of other cultures’ dignity, anthropologists laid the groundwork for multiculturalism and affirmed a pluralist public sphere. On the other hand, ethnographic translations of other cultures are implicitly written in defiance of their readership’s liberal “commonsense,” e.g., the presumed universality of the self-maximizing individual (homo economicus). Inspired by either perspective, anthropologists constituted their field as the study of all that is illiberal “out there” in the world. When they found among their ethnographic subjects those who talked a liberal game, they probably tried to ignore them, much as they did the missionaries (or native converts) whose Christianity placed them outside the frame of “traditional culture.” Liberalism became an object of anthropological study only after the unit of ethnographic analysis shifted (during the 1980s) from that of the bounded cultural group to that of the globally intertwined locus (with the concomitant advent of “studying up” in the developed world). Around the same time, a new theoretical armature came to such studies from Michel Foucault’s later lectures on “governmentality,” in which he exposed individual freedom’s complicity with projects of rule. And there was a third influence: the sea changes of globalization associated with the diminution of Keynesian welfare states, the loosening of regulations on capital flows, and the ascendancy of market fundamentalism signaled the rebirth of an economic liberalism—“neoliberalism”—that altered many ethnographic landscapes. Indeed, it is a disciplinary irony that interest in neoliberal generally preceded interest in liberalism. And yet the irony makes sense in light of the increasingly visible contradiction between the deepening of market-driven inequalities and the continued hegemony of classical liberalism’s premises (rationality, universalism, progress, etc.). In the early 21st century, the anthropology of liberalism falls between two ideal types. Comprising one type are the relatively few inquiries for which liberalism is the central object of study, those presented under the headings “late liberalism” and “the liberal subject.” Comprising the second type are those lines of inquiry—“humanitarianism,” “secularism,” “human rights,” “civil society and the public sphere,” “citizenship,” “democracy,” “multiculturalism,” and “governmentality”—in which liberalism figures as one among other key analytics. Within these literatures, one finds more or less attention to liberalism per se. At times, it appears to be only the philosophical or historical backdrop to the ethnographic frame, while at others, liberalism’s diaspora and contradictions are named as the most salient precipitate of the social activity under description. In sum, anthropology, proceeding on a number of fronts (and not always in coordination), has begun to ambush liberalism as a belated object of study.

This essay analyses the 2016 congressional impeachment of Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, fo... more This essay analyses the 2016 congressional impeachment of
Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, for alleged budgetary
misconduct, as well as the related right-wing, ‘anti-corruption’
demonstrations calling for her ouster. I argue that Rousseff’s
impeachment was facilitated by a conflation of two models of
‘corruption’ operating in Brazil, one legal-behavioural and the
other religious-ontological. What happened in 2016 was a tacit
conflation of these two models, along with their associated
regimes for construing evidence of guilt. More specifically,
congressional deliberations on Rousseff’s guilt allowed
jurisprudential standards of evidence to be influenced by the
evidential regime of the right-wing Fora Dilma (‘Out Dilma’)
demonstrators. The demonstrators evinced Rousseff’s corruption
through a semiotic process I term ‘cross-domain homology’, a
process that I claim is intrinsically dangerous for democracy
because it invites a state of exception to the norms girding
representative institutions.

This paper explores rural Brazilians' interpretations of and ethical reflections on political cli... more This paper explores rural Brazilians' interpretations of and ethical reflections on political clientelism. Brazilian elites often regard the people of the dry hinterland (sertanejos) as lazy, politically apathetic, and prone to corrupting democratic elections through the sale of their votes. Here I argue that the sertanejos living in the northeastern state of Piauí practice a form of clientelism that entails an ethical distinction between degraded vote buying and morally upright electoral transactions with politicians. For the sertanejos of Piauí's interior, ethical electoral transactions do not corrupt democratic elections; they reverse the moral damage that elections themselves cause. Elections refigure socially embedded persons as numerical individuals destined to be added together as equal quanta of generic value. Ethical transactions reconstitute the voter's socially embedded personhood after the election has passed. However, rather than vindicating clientelism, this analysis draws attention to the social inequalities that prevent some people from practicing the ethical forms of political exchange. It therefore builds toward a standpoint for critiquing political clientelism that does not reproduce liberal idealizations of democratic citizenship.

This paper analyzes the political importance of a rural Brazilian blessing ritual performed by tr... more This paper analyzes the political importance of a rural Brazilian blessing ritual performed by transgenerational kin in order to question the assumption that a democratic public sphere presupposes the exclusion of familial obligations from civil talk and impartial governance. By analyzing several folk models of blessing behavior that inhabitants of the rural northeastern backlands (sert~ ao) use to interpret blessings, I argue that hierarchical genres of family communication can serve as models for civility and impartiality among non-kin. This analysis illuminates the discursive processes by which sertanejos dismantle illiberal features of their political culture, including clientelist forms of resource distribution.

This paper explores the Workers’ Party government’s attempt to use anti-poverty policy to disrupt... more This paper explores the Workers’ Party government’s attempt to use anti-poverty policy to disrupt rural patronage, and the implications of this effort for theories of patronage. I argue that state officials and race-based activists implementing President Lula’s flagship ‘Zero Hunger Program’ (2003–2005) turned mundane program exercises into pilgrimage rites in an effort to build lateral solidarities among Afro-Brazilians and undermine their vertical patronage alliances. The partial success of such efforts suggests that there are circumstances in which vertical and horizontal alliances are compatible, and that investigating this compatibility entails consideration of local categories of exchange.
Keywords: Brazil; zero hunger; patronage; clientelism

American Ethnologist, 2009

In this article, I explain the unfolding of a participatory development project in northeast Br... more In this article, I explain the unfolding of a
participatory development project in northeast
Brazil by exploring how local genres of public
speech articulate with categories of wealth.
Although development resources cannot be easily
categorized into local classes of wealth, they
nonetheless evoke some of the anxieties cultivators
feel when dealing with wealth forms susceptible to
the evil eye. Beliefs surrounding the evil eye shape
cultivators’ relations to material objects, and they
also define the contours of safe and acceptable
speech within the village development association.
As a result, during association meetings, the
villagers speak in ways that frustrate development
agents seeking to generate “open” and
“transparent” managerial discourse felicitous to
project success—at least, external notions of
project success. Appreciating the link between
wealth and speech forms sheds light on both the
local implementation challenges that participants in
such projects face and the reason development
agents frequently blame ostensive project failures
on beneficiary backwardness.

American Anthropologist, 2010

Fundraising auctions help people in a small rural town in Northeast Brazil reckon with the effect... more Fundraising auctions help people in a small rural town in Northeast Brazil reckon with the effects that
currency stabilization and democratization have had on municipal politics. These simultaneous processes havemade
politics confusing for the people of Passerinho by creating multiple modalities of electoral reciprocity. In this article,
I argue that the ritual procedures of the auctions commensurate these modalities of reciprocity through a semiotic
procedure in which money signifies both exchange value and more personal forms of value. I consider the auction’s
impact on municipal politics by looking at its effect on the narrative of democratic progress and on the prestige of
grassroots politicians, traditional elites, and voluntary associations.

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2011

Clientelist systems vary, and this variation influences the adoption and evolution of conditional... more Clientelist systems vary, and this variation influences the adoption and evolution of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. We find that vertically integrated, corporatist clientelism in Mexico and more locally oriented, bossist clientelism in Brazil differentially shape the choices of
governments to turn piecemeal, discretionary CCTs into more expansive and secure benefits.