IN LATE MARCH 2016, Uber’s communication manager for the Southern Cone was asked on live radio whether the platform would launch its services in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, despite authorities’ warnings that it would be breaking the law. She replied, “Yes, definitely.”1 Uber was a contract between private parties, she argued, perfectly allowed in the juridical order of Buenos Aires; it was also an innovative service, therefore outside the remit of existing transportation laws. The company was ready to cooperate with city authorities to develop together regulation fit for twenty-first-century technologies, she closed matter-of-factly. London, Rio, New York, Santiago de Chile, Paris: Buenos Aires’s residents geared up for their turn in a world saga by then epic and viral and heady with a whiff of the foretold. Cars ablaze and street fighting in foreign lands flickered on national media, sensational spoilers of a conflict that had not even begun but that announced itself to a city prone to popular protests in the warnings of taxi drivers’ union leader, Omar Viviani: “[The company] will have a problem with us, for under no circumstances will we allow their arrival.”2 By then, thirteen-million-strong Buenos Aires was one of the few large metropolises in the world left without any ride-sharing platform.
On March 27, the Twitter account @Uber_ARG went live and tweeted: “Would you like to be your own boss driving with Uber? Register at sociosar.com and find out more.”3 The evening of the twenty-eighth, Uber officials held an induction session at a hotel downtown; taxi drivers gathered outside, chanting and smashing windows and making primetime news. On March 29, @Uber_ARG tweeted that over ten thousand people had already signed up as drivers.4 The epigrammatic brevity of Twitter’s interface enhanced the effect of its cunning use as the sole source of publicly available information: the result was electrifying. On April 12 around midday, news broke that Uber had tweeted it would be available at 4:00 p.m. that very same day.5 Right after four, Ignacio Viale, youngest of a long line of TV personalities and millennial enfant terrible, livestreamed in an elaborate PR stunt what was effectively the first Uber ride on Argentine soil. Within hours several taxi driver associations initiated legal action, accusing Uber of unlawful use of public space, danger to public safety, lack of appropriate driving permits and insurances, tax avoidance, and price dumping. Uber is a company, they spelled out categorically, an explicit affront to the company’s self-description as an immaterial intermediary made of virtual optima untapped until then.
The following day, April 13, at exactly 11:00 a.m., taxis blockaded twenty-five intersections simultaneously, paralyzing Buenos Aires for an entire hour, and a city judge issued a precautionary ban against Uber effective immediately. By this point Uber had been downloaded ninety thousand times and had processed twenty thousand ride requests, according to the press.6 On April 14, traffic wardens fined an Uber driver the equivalent of 4,130 USD, withheld his driving permit, and towed his car away. On Friday 15, Uber officials retorted that the company would reimburse its “associates”’ fines, doubling down on Twitter: “Find out about us and defend your right to choose. Until next Wednesday, 15 free rides up to 200 pesos. #Righttochoose,” adding a link to a blog.7 The city mayor announced cryptically that Argentines should welcome “modernity” within the framework of the law; and that day, too, newly elected president of Argentina Mauricio Macri declared that “the taxis of Buenos Aires are a symbol of the city and the nation.”8 Uber had been in Argentina for less than seventy-two hours.
Uber’s arrival found me there, in Buenos Aires, where I was born and raised and where I had returned seven months earlier to research, of all things, its taxi industry. I had left Argentina as an economist trained by the Universidad del CEMA, one of the unshakable neoliberal bastions of the Southern Cone, to retrain as a social anthropologist in the UK. As part of my doctoral project at the University of Manchester, on August 2015 I arrived in Buenos Aires for a year of fieldwork on the taxi industry’s political economy, its union life, and its drivers’ “urban charisma”: that wily jaded iconicity animating urban taxi drivers everywhere, from Johannesburg to Sao Paulo, from Jakarta to London.9
From the second someone described Uber’s arrival as “imminent,” an avalanche of economic intuitions, blasts of moral outrage, partisan accusations, and cultural anxieties barraged the industry I had come to know very well by then: notions of monopoly, choice, efficiency, empowerment, innovation, opportunism, competition, and freedom combined in a brutal rhetorical siege. Ferocious, principled, spiteful, and occasionally compassionate, most of these arguments were, strictly speaking, unfair, inconsistent, unverifiable, or misdirected. Some were hyperbolic to the point of caricature. Yet together they framed a field of contention where, regardless of their truth value, it became increasingly difficult to meaningfully counter their claims—to respond to them. The taxi industry’s arguments, even enhanced by governmental support, were increasingly not exactly opposed but rather explained away, subsumed into the very workings of that attack from all directions, and effectively neutralized. As Uber hit half a million downloads in May 2016, I decided that the company and the taxi industry in and of themselves were not as important to me, to public debate, and to current anthropological, economic, and political thinking as the conflict that entwined them.10 The reasoning, arguments, and anxieties that wrote the taxi industry off became the focus of my project, and that project became this book.
The lines of this conflict were set by the intuitions, aspirations, and exasperations of a certain Buenos Aires middle class. In strict socioeconomic terms, these were residents able to take taxis regularly or casually and used to circulating with a given ease in a relatively middle-class city, thus a prime target for Uber’s service. But this was never a strictly socioeconomic conflict or one solely about alternative ways of moving around, so its rhetoric and intensity exceeded the bounds of that middle class’s transportation practices and economic possibilities.
A city founded for capitalist trade and for much of its history wealthier than its European counterparts, Buenos Aires today stamps its residents’ imagination with the watermark of a thwarted prospect of wealth and cosmopolitan modernity, its outlines all the more vivid against the knowledge that from all evidence something fell apart somewhere down the line. The exact forensics and chronology of the country’s downfall are contentious battlegrounds, but Argentines on the whole agree that the story of this lower-middle-income nation, whose cultural, political, and economic epicenter always was and remains Buenos Aires, should really have played out very differently. Argentina’s famous 2001 economic crash summarized this frustration in the quotable war cry Que se vayan todos: let them all go. Targeting primarily the then-president, who indeed fled the headquarters of the executive power by helicopter that day, the phrase extends to established parties and structures of political action and representation. It also symbolizes a decades-old disillusionment that transcends politics and seeps into the experience of a certain Argentine middle-class life, yearning for some sort of answer or purge. I was fifteen in 2001, and part of the generation of Argentines that shortly after spiked enrollment in economics and kindred degrees in higher education to at least give that yearning a frame.
Between the crisis and Uber’s arrival, Argentines were ruled by the left-of-center administrations of Néstor Kirchner (2003–7) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–11 and 2011–15). The fiscal expansionism, historical revisionism, economic isolationism, and increasingly choleric populism of these years bitterly divided the city’s middle class, shaping how residents linked their political experience as individuals, as a social group, and as Argentines to those frustrations and disillusionments. On the whole, the city of Buenos Aires opposed both administrations. Economically liberal in a broad, nonfanatical way; culturally liberal in a globalist, self-conscious sense; and politically pluralist in an unreflexively self-defined manner: the portion of the middle class holding these positions experienced these years as an era of “hyperpoliticization,” contrived and cynical culture wars, mismanaged natural potential, irrational nationalism, unstrategic regionalism, and the factionalist and grossly inefficient bloating of the public sector. Huge political actors in Argentina, trade unions fed these frustrations, less as sectorial representatives and more through their reactive, allegedly opportunistic political and partisan enmeshment with the running of the country since the 1930s.
By 2016, taxi drivers’ union leader Omar Viviani was a political ally of both Kirchners, which, together with his uninterrupted three-decade rule over the taxi trade, epitomized the vices that exasperated this part of the middle class. They also blamed him directly, derivatively, and just in case for the excesses, real and exaggerated, of a trade involving millions of transactions per day in an unpredictably volatile city at the level of the street. Meanwhile, in December 2015, right-of-center Mauricio Macri had become president of Argentina, voted in on a technocratic manifesto that passed for an electoral platform. He promised the nation, “a team of millions,” the resumption of international trade, respect for the institutions and rule of law, and Herculean infrastructural investments. In a poetic, logistical, and cultural sense, Macri’s triumph paved the way for Uber’s arrival barely three months later; together, the company, Macri’s administration, Viviani’s ominous shadow, and the anxieties of an electorally relieved middle class would frame the experience of Uber’s conflict in 2016 Buenos Aires: these people, as “a People,” wanted Uber.
This frame would very quickly evidence immense contradictions, inconsistencies, spurious correlations, and a myriad other fault lines. The same middle class expressly decrying informal economies, tax evasion, and disregard for the law, who found in Macri’s administration a viable answer to these concerns, was now enthralled by a service ostentatiously flouting a raft of fiscal, commercial, and civil laws and overtly defined as illegal by several courts and by Macri’s own government. As the conflict gathered pace, however, it became increasingly evident that to focus on these fault lines as such amounted to indulging in a pedantic, self-serious literalism that would have spectacularly missed what was actually at stake. Propelling the arguments, just out of view, choice as a moral good, the axiomatic virtue of competition, technological determinism, popular legitimacy, and other by now instinctive grammars of late capitalism reinforced each other, preempting, dissolving, subsuming, and pathologizing the very possibility of disagreeing with the stakes they claimed.
I took that frenzied tangle seriously, or seriously enough not to take it literally, and followed its arguments, passions, and actions through to their logical and material conclusions. I did not seek to figure out who was “right” or whose arguments were sounder or more resonant with the academic urge to pontificate in the key of resistance. Rather, I set out to explain why and how it became so difficult for the taxi industry to make their case before the tribunal of popular opinion—to be afforded the bare dignity of being heard, even with a judicial injunction and government action on their side. Beyond Uber and beyond Buenos Aires, my goal here is to understand how people reflect on their reasons, and the reasons of others, when they come to disagree through the rhetorical resources of late capitalism. This conflict shows exceptionally well how certain ways of reasoning reorganize who can take meaningful part in the common experience of public life, or not, and how one can meaningfully disagree. In the material, emotional, and rhetorical reshuffling that the Uber conflict triggered, the taxi industry, that is, those who disagreed, were assigned the part that was there but was silenced, the part that existed but could only ever utter white noise, the part that was around but whose reasons were disavowed, or in other words: the part that had no part.
What does it mean to say that the taxi industry became “the part that had no part” in the common experience of Buenos Aires in 2016? To understand this argument, let us begin with the premise, developed by philosopher Jacques Rancière, that people and institutions participate in a “distribution of the sensible”: a sort of allocation of roles, parts, times, and scopes delineating how each can rightfully and meaningfully participate in the common experience of the social life they share.11 This distribution is not just a code, or a list of roles written down somewhere: it comes to life as people engage with each other in spontaneous yet patterned ways through buildings, laws, databases, ethical duties, arguments, expectations, and of course, taxi rides. This is a social experience, including but going well beyond political theory or a constitutional article.
That the experience is common means that everyone knows how they, and others, belong in that experience, and that they know their parts are relative to the whole and to each other’s. It does not mean it includes them all as equals, and certainly not in the same way: someone writes laws, someone obeys them; someone is called upon to address a public health crisis; someone can drive someone else for money, and someone’s arguments inform what counts as a fair taxi fare; someone can take someone to court, demand reimbursement from an insurer, or complain about a taxi driver who has “taken them for a ride,” and for each of these parts there will be different kinds of language, tones, moments, and spaces that can and will count, and others that will not. This last point is crucial: when defining the distribution of the sensible as “a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of the form of experience,” Rancière reminded us that there is always a part that is there but that has no part.12 Be it Roman plebeians or the homeless of a wealthy Western capital, this part is physically and even institutionally and formally there, but in a way it comes not to count as others do. It may speak the same language as the others, but its words are not intelligible on a par; it may utter refined arguments, but others can afford to not engage it in debate at no moral loss; it may scream back the utterances of other parts, even verbatim, but when coming from its lips those same claims sound as noise.
What exactly does being a part but having no part entail, in general, and in Uber’s conflict in Buenos Aires in particular? After all, by early 2021, nearly five years after the company’s first ride in Buenos Aires, taxis continue to exist pretty much as they did before, the union is still there, the government still manages the trade with the same laws, and offshoots of the original legal case against Uber continue to make their way through the same courts and are still subjected to the same judicial authority. In important formal, political, and institutional ways, which were the ones that mattered to Rancière’s thought, most activities, roles, expectations, and reciprocal relations between the industry, its authorities, its customers, the union, remain unchanged.
Yet this was a conflict that engulfed political parties, influencers, news commentators, and public opinion at large, playing out in streets, social media, and PR blitzes as much as, if not more than, it did in courts. What I argue here is that, from the perspective of the part that defined public debate around Uber’s arrival, that is, the segment of the middle class outlined above, grew the arguments, intuitions, and exasperations that progressively reshaped the common experience around this conflict. It was this reshuffling that wrote off the taxi industry and its arguments. Half-baked associations between the taxi license and ideas of competition, anxious technological determinism, and an unbridled, feverish, and increasingly pervasive obsession with “what the people want” that precious few public institutions dare counter effectively overrode the industry’s attempts at talking back in a conflict where its livelihoods were at stake, even as taxis drove that very middle class around every day. The logical, rhetorical, and affective experience of that middle class and its economic, cultural, ethical, and political arguments subsumed the taxi industry in a process whose meaning and consequences it could barely influence, let alone control. It was in that experience, too, that this exclusion was no longer up for debate; the experience became common in the other sense of the term, common as in naturalized, taken for granted, beyond disagreement, or in other words: depoliticized.
In Rancière’s thought, always at society’s level, this depoliticization takes place through statewide institutions and logics of government that disavow genuine disagreement.13 Put simply, these are the politics of our times, of spreadsheets and consultants, where actual change seems impossible—a postpolitical order of “technocratic mechanisms and consensual procedures . . . [where] political contradictions are reduced to policy problems to be managed by experts and legitimated through participatory processes,” pathologizing real disagreement.14 Certainly, Macri’s project for Argentina fits quite well this definition of a postpolitical government. Yet this alone cannot explain how the taxi industry came to be written off, even if that segment of the middle class that so desired Uber did vote for Macri, not least since his cabinet and administration, as well as judges under his wing, publicly endorsed the taxi industry’s argument.
This is where ethnography as a method and anthropology as a way of understanding how things matter gain the upper hand. To grasp how the taxi industry was disavowed not institutionally but in public debate, casual conversation, and trivial transactions, we must focus on how, in the throes of the Uber conflict and independently of any governmental projects, that middle class developed what I refer to here as postpolitical reasoning: the logics, rhetoric, and affects that people mobilize to imagine, legitimize, and argue for a common experience where a certain kind of disagreement is foreclosed. Reasoning here does not mean a logico-mathematical sequence, or a positivistic or Cartesian ordering. Rather, it means the process and method of developing knowledge and of organizing and making sense of that knowledge—of excluding, prioritizing, and associating specific aspects of what emerges as known and knowable. With the term postpolitical reasoning I seek to capture how, through particular ways of knowing, certain possibilities of disagreeing come to be disavowed.
Whereas postpolitical orders, the ones Rancière was properly concerned about, are led by canonically defined experts, postpolitical reasoning is a nonexpert way of knowing that does not necessarily seek to make an expert adjudication or to address the adjudication of experts, however defined, when disavowing certain stakes or when pronouncing itself in terms of truths. This is not to say it is random or illogical, but simply a reminder that, through whatever means at hand, “nonexperts” are working through the same questions “experts” ask.15 The answers nonexperts produce put pressure on popular imaginations (and governmental projects) not necessarily because of their “truthfulness” or accuracy, but because of how they organize what others can know. For example, among this middle class, the courts’ technical struggle to interrupt Uber operations passed for evidence of the company’s self-description as an immaterial mediator beyond politics. That this argument may “actually” be spurious is beside the point: it mattered because in this form it framed the middle class’s reasoning of their experience, and in this form it made it harder for the taxi industry to talk back. In this sense, this book argues for an attention to the sense nonexperts make of economic and political processes.
Similarly, because of their proximity to what people see as relevant, affects, broadly speaking emotions, motivate, propel, and galvanize postpolitical reasoning. Postpolitical technocrats of the kind Rancière imagined may certainly act on emotions, or even codify them in governmental projects or stir them in others, but their statist framework requires that they work through forms of knowing deliberately and ostentatiously separated from emotion. Meanwhile, anthropologists have long known that things like suspicion, exasperation, and excitement are not just cultural accidents added onto the bare bones of experience: they define experiences and shape their effects. When residents insisted, with caustic irritation, that Uber was “everywhere in the world except here,” the factoid that Uber was not really everywhere in the world was completely incidental to the work such statements were doing to place the company’s presence in a rhetorical zone of beyond-contention. Tracing how affects contribute to generating the categories of postpolitical reasoning, this book contributes to a growing academic literature concerned with affect as a form of knowing.16
Last, postpolitical reasoning constantly invokes principles such as the inherent virtue of competition, the axiomatic goodness of individual choice, and the “natural” “forces” of economic processes. These tropes are all buried in the intuitions of late capitalism. Developed by a clique of philosophers in the late nineteenth century who gave them the language and iron-clad certainties of physics, they were always moralizing claims about aspects of life that should be understood as beyond disagreement.17 In the mid-twentieth century they also served as the philosophical spine to the governmental project we now call neoliberalism. Through the latter’s institutions and market interventions these tropes expanded around the world and took on the aura of an eternal righteousness.18 In this sense, postpolitical reasoning shares an ideological repertoire with postpolitical government. Yet, whereas the latter promotes neoliberal administration, postpolitical reasoning remains within the diffuse argumentative space where these tropes tend to tangle themselves up, explaining and doubling for each other, enhancing the experience of their instinctive, ordered righteousness with a “spare and logical clarity.”19
My first aim in tracing these tropes individually is to understand how each contributed to postpolitical reasoning. The slightly stylized narrative resulting from this decision was a small price to pay to serve my second aim here: to develop through these tropes a viable alternative to the ever-popular genre “critiques of ‘neoliberalism.’” I seek disciplinary precision, an argumentative strategy and a grammar to understand the moral, natural, and instrumental invocations usually lumped together in the term neoliberalism.
In recent years, the bandying about of the term neoliberalism in social science scholarship has rendered the term increasingly confusing and vague, multiplying flagrant contradictions within arguments and often in the same text.20 This imprecision is particularly salient in the most activist scholarship, whose constant denunciation of “neoliberalism” is quickly losing explanatory power and jading everyone outside of its most fervent practitioners. To say that Uber, its practices, its CEOs, or even Argentina’s government are “neoliberal” is probably true, a truism by now, and places us on the right side of what is an increasingly moralized, moralizing opposition. Yet even if we were using the term with canonical precision, it would tell us little about why masses of Buenos Aires’s broadly law-abiding middle class instinctively understood that their “right to choose to use Uber” should trump the judicial system’s admonitions against it. This is probably what many of us, including the activists, are actually concerned about. Historically anterior, logically much more specific, and rhetorically far more complex than “neoliberalism,” the tropes I retrace will teach us what was actually at stake in postpolitical reasoning. As a result, the word neoliberalism barely features in the book beyond this introduction.
All these features were often indistinguishable from each other; I have tried to capture their entanglement by speaking of the “logics, rhetoric, and affects” of postpolitical reasoning. My analysis does not seek to make a moral claim or to be intelligible to contemporary anthropological mandates to “speak truth to power.” Truth and power are immensely complex categories, and I have not let the middle class’s emergence as the powerful actor here reorient my analysis to defend “the weak,” even if I did march alongside taxi drivers against the company and even if, at heart, I agreed with them. I saw my ethical duty not in determining whether, for example, Uber’s algorithms were “actually” fairer or more efficient than the taxi industry’s arrangements but in tracing the logical, rhetorical, and affective associations that allowed a self-styled beleaguered middle class to reflect on fairness and efficiency as a problem to be foreclosed through algorithms. This is, in a sense, nothing other than a return to the canon of the British anthropology tradition I am trained in. It always mattered little whether, as Evans-Pritchard infamously said, “Witches, as Azande conceive them, cannot exist.”21 But the point, in this tradition, is that it also matters little whether the “truth” is that they “can” exist; the anthropological duty is to figure out how, why, and in what circumstances a particular group of people think of their relations in terms of something such as witchcraft, or fairness, or efficiency. No other discipline is better equipped to shine this kind of light on “truth” and “power” however defined.
Last, certain readers will notice that in developing the case for postpolitical reasoning I draw on what some social scientists call antipolitical events or processes.22 We are talking about similar issues; postpolitical reasoning captures better the temporal horizon and teleological aspirations of this thinking and emphasizes foreclosure and disavowal rather than antagonism, although at times the difference is cosmetic. My choice also allowed me to capture the echoes between this reasoning and Argentina’s incoming administration in 2015: technocratic, postpolitical, and, in the specific sense of an institutional and ideological project, neoliberal. I turn now to examine the economic, political, and cultural features of that part of Buenos Aires’s middle class that by 2016 longed to disavow the kind of disagreement a conflict over a ride-sharing app epitomized.
1. “The Southern Cone” is a cultural, historical, and economic denomination for the southernmost nations of South America, always including Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile and including in certain uses Paraguay and southern Brazil as well. The interview was part of the radio show Lanata sin filtro, aired March 28, 2016. The relevant extract was uploaded to YouTube on the same date: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=UkgWtW9oZaU.
2. “Los taxistas se oponen a Uber: ‘No lo vamos a permitir bajo ningún concepto,’” La Nación, March 28, 2016, https://www.lanacion.com.ar/ buenos-aires/los-taxistas-se-oponen-a-uber-no-lo-vamos-a-permitir-bajo-ningun-concepto-nid1883806.
3. Uber Argentina, tweet, March 27, 2016, https://twitter.com/Uber_ARG/status/714105410689638400.
4. Uber Argentina, tweet, March 29, 2016, https://twitter.com/ Uber_ARG/status/714826354676658176.
5. “Uber comenzará a operar esta tarde en Buenos Aires,” Revista Fibra, April 12, 2016, http://revistafibra.info/ uber-comenzara-operar-esta-tarde-buenos-aires/.
6. Guillermo Tomoyose, “Los números de Uber en Buenos Aires: 90 mil descargas de la aplicación y 20 mil pedidos de viajes en 24 horas,” La Nación, April 14, 2016, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/ 1889277-los-numeros-de-uber-90-mil-descargas-de-la-aplicacion-y-20-milpedidos-de-viajes-en-24-horas.
7. Uber Argentina, tweet, “Conocenos y defendé tu derecho a elegir. Hasta el miércoles tendrás 15 viajes gratis hasta $200. #DerechoAElegir https://newsroom.uber.com/argentina/ es/defende-tu-derechoaelegir-viaja-en-uber-y-todos-tus-viajes-seran-gratis/ . . . ,” April 15, 2016, https://twitter.com/ Uber_ARG/status/721048455632842753. See also “Defendé tu #DerechoAElegir, ¡Viajá en Uber y todos tus viajes serán gratis!” Uber Blog, April 15, 2016, https://www.uber.com/es-AR/blog/ defende-tu-derechoaelegir-viaja-en-uber-y-todos-tus-viajes-seran-gratis/.
8. “La batalla por la calle está en la ley,” Página/12, March 30, 2016, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/ 3–295709-2016-03-30.html; and “Uber: Macri defendió a taxistas y dijo que son ‘un símbolo,’” Perfil, April 14, 2016, https://www.perfil.com/noticias/politica/ uber-macri-defendio-a-los-taxistas-dijo-que-son-un-simbolo-20160414-0026.phtml, respectively.
9. Hansen and Verkaaik (2009) originally developed the concept of urban charisma.
10. “Uber sigue en la mira, pero no se detiene: Tuvo 500 mil descargas y ya cuenta con 37 mil choferes,” La Nación, May 19, 2016, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/ 1900153-uber-sigue-en-la-mira.
11. Rancière (2011).
12. Rancière (2011: 13), my emphasis.
13. He approaches the depoliticization of the distribution of the sensible through the notions of archipolitics, metapolitics, and parapolitics and the emergence of “consensus democracy.” See Rancière (1999: 61–93).
14. Wilson and Swyngedouw (2014: 6). On the postpolitical more broadly, see Mouffe (1993, 2005), Žižek (2009), and Crouch (2004).
15. For the inclusion of nonexperts in social studies of knowledge, see Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe (2009) and Barry and Slater (2005).
16. See Reeves (2011), Demetriou (2007), Navaro-Yashin (2002, 2012), Nuijten (2004), Aretxaga (1999), Thiranagama and Kelly (2010), Laszczkowski and Reeves (2017), Stafford (2019), and Shiller (2019). Jansen (2016) discusses the difference between theorizing from affect and taking affect ethnographically seriously.
17. See Mirowski (1989) and Wasserman (2019).
18. Whyte (2019) and Slobodian (2018) examine the emergence of neoliberalism as an institutional and political project.
19. Carrier (1997: 14); see also Carrier (2012).
20. See Venugopal (2015) and Ferguson (2009); Eriksen et al. (2015) debate whether social sciences, specifically anthropology, should even use the concept of neoliberalism at all.
21. Evans-Pritchard (1965: 63).
22. For example, Ferguson (1990), Whyte (2019), and Barry (2005).
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