Anti-Crisis

Janet Roitman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa.

“One of the great strengths of Roitman’s book is that by analysing how we come to view certain events as being indications of a ‘crisis’, she also sheds light on the way we construct our notion of ‘normalcy.’  . . . Anti-Crisis is clearly the product of a serious attempt to think outside the usual academic boxes, and as such it deserves much praise. It is to Roitman’s credit, and to the reader’s benefit, that she largely succeeds in her aim to illuminate the notion of crisis as an object of knowledge.” - Luke McDonagh (LSE Review of Books) “Anti-Crisis is an engaging, timely, and provocative critical analysis of contemporary crisis narratives. It does work that few others have undertaken by plumbing the roots of crisis as a historico-philosophical concept and approaching its narration as a discursive tool for the defense of the status quo and the interests animating it. Roitman does a superb job of excavating and analyzing the technical practices that allowed for what were at one moment regarded as legitimate and lucrative practices of debt capitalization to be transfigured in the next moment into toxic obligations requiring public bailouts in order to rescue the world as we know it.” - Alex Khasnabish (Anthropological Quarterly) “Roitman’s book fulfills multiple timely and important tasks. . . . Roitman therefore calls attention to the contingent practices which constitute normality as institutional legitimacy. . . . The merit of this perspective is that it restores politicality both in and beyond crisis conditions.” - Sascha Engel (New Political Science) “Anti-Crisis draws our attention to a range of key issues in social theory: critique and crisis are cognates whereby crisis is necessary for the enunciation of critique and that crisis may be understood as a blind spot that regulates narratives about contemporary history-enabling and disenabling certain questions. Ultimately, Roitman’s elaboration of crisis is significant insofar as it is understood, not as a condition, but as an observation about history that generates meanings - meanings that are contested and the product of particular ideological vantage points.” - Jude Fokwang (Anthropology of Southern Africa) “The book offers important insights for ethnography insofar as crisis is either a backdrop for many ethnographic projects. . . . Furthermore, our discipline’s increasing focus on problems rather than ethnoi will require anthropologists to reflect carefully on articulations of crisis. Conceptual work is delicate business, which Roitman handles with aplomb. Anti-Crisis offers an important caution for those engaged in ethnographic work: fieldworkers should be attentive to the overlaps and differences between the concepts used by participants in research and the concepts deployed in analysis.” - Daromir Rudnyckyj (American Ethnologist) "An immensely rich, atypical and inspiring account of the calculus of crisis." - Radman Selmic (Journal of Cultural Economy) "Well written and provocative, Anti-Crisis makes a great contribution to conceptual anthropology. By dislodging a key term in contemporary critical theories, it poses an exciting challenge to scholars within and beyond the discipline, at the same time reasserting anthropology’s broader intellectual relevance." - Amalia Sa'ar (American Anthropologist)

• Acknowledgments xiIntroduction. What Is at Stake? 11. Crisis Demands 15Judgment Day The Moral Demand The Test 2. Crisis Narratives 41Bubbles Houses Finance Subjects 3. Crisis: Refrain! 71Noncrisis Narrations The Crisis that does not Obtain Conclusion: Dreams 91Notes 97References 133Index 153