Tumultuous Politics of Scale

Donald M. Nonini, Professor of Anthropology, University of NorthCarolina, Chapel Hill, has undertaken research in Malaysia, Australia, and theUnited States on citizenship in the Chinese diaspora; U.S. local politics; andon the commons. His latest book is “Getting by”: Class and State Formationamong Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press, 2015).Ida Susser, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter Collegeand the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has published onpopular mobilizations, social movements, and the urban commons in theUnited States, Europe, and Southern Africa. Her books include NormanStreet: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood (Oxford University Press,2012) and the co- edited volumes, Rethinking America (CRC Press, 2009) andWounded Cities (Berg, 2003).

This book is a worthy and interesting contribution to the revival of "political-economic anthropology" -- that is to the analysis of ethnographic findings in terms of vastly unequal classes and class struggles. The book’s central question is what it means for anthropologists to return to political economy in the globalized world of today. Overall, the collection of essays makes the case for a new set of interlocutors for the discipline. Jane Schneider, City University of New York

• 1. Introduction – The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: History, Class, and Agency Revisited [Donald M. Nonini and Ida Susser] Part I. Scales of Domination: Transnational Migration and its Discontents 2. The Making and Un-Making of Border Scales: European Union Migration Control in North and West Africa [Sebastian Cobarrubias] 3. The Temporalities in Migration: Women and Reproduction in the Affective Economies of Late Capitalism [Winnie Lem] Part II. Problematizing the Nation and the Nation-State 4. Political Violence, Criminal Law, and Shifting Scales of Justice [Ruchi Chaturvedi] 5. Networked Flows through a "Porous" State: A Scalar Energo-political Account of the Greek Debt Crisis [Sandy Smith-Nonini] Part III. Rescaling Sovereignty: The Case of the European Union and Its Outside Insiders 6. Making the Eastern Scale: Class, Contradiction, and the Rise of the ‘illiberal’ Right in Post-socialist Central Europe [Don Kalb] 7. Reimagining Scale, Space and Sovereignty: The United Kingdom and "Brexit" [John Clarke] Part IV. The Longue Durée 8. Interrogating the Agrarian Question Then and Now in Terms of Uneven and Combined Development [Gavin Smith] 9. Dispossession and Emancipation: Reframing Labor’s Political Question for the Neoliberal Era [August Carbonella] Part V. Social Movements: Transforming the Scales s of Conflict 10. Downscaled "Local Food" Movements from Below and the Corporate Food Movement from Above: What’s at Stake? [Donald M. Nonini] 11. Localism in One Local: Labor and Scale at the Saturn Automobile Factory [Sharryn Kasmir] 12. Popular Mobilization: Rescaling As a Consequence of Nuit Debout/Occupy [Ida Susser]