Introduction Ethnographic Engagements with Global Elites

THEME SECTION Introduction Ethnographic engagements with global elites

Paul Robert Gilbert and Jessica Sklair

Abstract: Anthropological interest in critical studies of class, system, and inequality has recently been revitalized. Most ethnographers have done this from “below,” while studies of fi nancial, political, and other professional elites have tended to avoid the language of class, capital, and inequality. Th is themed section draws together ethnographies of family wealth transfers, philanthropy, and private sector development to refl ect on the place of critique in the anthropology of elites. While disciplinary norms and ethics usually promote deferral to our research participants, the uncritical translation of these norms “upward” to studies of elites raises concerns. We argue for a critical approach that does not seek political purity or attempt to “get the goods” on elites, but that makes explicit the politics involved in doing ethnography with elites. Keywords: class, critique, elites, ethnography, postcritique, studying up

Anthropology’s return that he fails to account for the “unsanctioned to political economy and unrecognized social relations that contrib- ute to the accumulation of wealth in society.” Th omas Piketty’s (2014) Capital in the Twenty- Likewise, Kapadia (2015: 510–511) notes that First Century, for all the discussions of inequal- Piketty’s comparisons between today’s patterns ity that it has brought into the pages of the busi- of inequality and those of the Belle Époque com- ness press, has hardly escaped criticism from mit the “sin of thinking that two social struc- anthropologists and political economists. Laura tures that have similar statistical properties Bear (2014), Stephen Gudeman (2015), and necessarily have similar social dynamics,” and Anush Kapadia (2015) have all drawn attention fail to bring the “institutional structures of con- to Piketty’s retreat from Marxian political econ- temporary capitalism into view.” omy and his confl ation of “capital” with quanti- But Piketty has also been praised for his at- tative measures of “wealth.” To Bear (2014: 643), tention to the conventionally anthropological Piketty’s reliance on national statistics means domains of kinship and inheritance. For Piketty,

Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 81 (2018): 1–15 © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/fcl.2018.810101 2 | Paul Robert Gilbert and Jessica Sklair the dilemma faced by Rastignac in Honoré de economic concerns about class and inequality Balzac’s (1835) Le Père Goriot—marry an heir- are just as incomplete as macroeconomic ac- ess about whom you care little (aft er disposing counts of wealth inequalities that overlook the of her brother), or fastidiously work your way intimate, aff ective relations through which pat- through law school and the judiciary to earn rimony becomes wealth (Yanagisako 2015). a comparative pittance—resonates today. Syl- Th e anthropology of elites has been con- via Yanagisako, whose ethnography of family cerned with “studying and understanding [elites] fi rms in Northern Italy had earlier explored the from within, trying to chart the cultural dynam- mutual constitution of kinship and capitalism ics and the habitus formation . . . that perpetuate (Yanagisako 2002), fi nds in Piketty an important their rule, dominance, or acceptance” (Salverda insight into the “structure of inequality,” as he and Abbink 2013: 2–3, emphasis added; see distinguishes the unequal distribution of income also Shore 2002: 5). But, the contributors to from labor and the unequal distribution of in- this theme section argue that it must equally herited wealth (Yanagisako 2015: 490). Despite be about the mutual constitution of elites and his attempt to steer “as far clear of a class analysis subalterns, something akin to what Erik Olin as possible in a study of wealth inequality in cap- Wright (2005: 23) has termed the “inverse in- italist societies,” Piketty has, it seems, driven a terdependent welfare principle.” Otherwise, we “nail in the coffi n of theories positing the decline risk “repeating the elite fantasy that their rising of the signifi cance of kinship in ‘modern’ (read fortunes are not interdependent with the dire capitalist) society.” Th at portion of the rising lev- straits of the lower orders” (Toscano and Wood- els of inequality that cannot be explained away cock 2015: 513; see also Gilbert, this issue). As through diff erential returns to labor and capital the contributors demonstrate, however, a criti- income may be accounted for in terms of kin- cal ethnographic study of elites throws up a set ship and inheritance—even if Piketty does not of challenges. Th e well-rehearsed disciplinary delve into the “intimate, aff ective, and gendered ideal of ethnographic encounters suff used with processes through which wealth becomes patri- mutuality (Pina-Cabral 2013; Sanjek 2014) does mony and patrimony becomes capital” (Yanagi- not necessarily sit well with a critical orientation sako 2015: 494; see Glucks berg, this issue; Sklair, toward the global inequalities that everyday in- this issue). timacies and aff ective relations might generate But all this should not be news to anthro- when one’s ethnographic subjects belong to a pology. In the periodic attempts that have been globally mobile, wealthy, and politically infl u- made to carve out a subfi eld that might be called ential demographic. the anthropology of elites (Abbink and Salverda Indeed, in recent decades there has been 2013; Marcus 1983; Pina-Cabral and Pedroso something of a turn away from critique in an- de Lima 2000; Shore and Nugent 2002), inheri- thropology and neighboring disciplines. Rather tance, succession, and kinship have oft en been at than confront the fact that the generation of the center of elite studies (see esp. Marcus 1983, global inequalities has, at its core, an intimate 1989, 2000; Pina-Cabral and Pedroso de Lima network of human relations (Bear et al. 2015), 2000). But instead of attending to the cogene- anthropologists and those in neighboring disci- ration of inheritance and inequality, attention plines have begun to present a turn toward cri- has been paid to the “resonance of family name tique as an anti-ethnographic move that curtails and identity” as the “most durable and valuable one’s ability to function properly as an ethnog- resource” in the reproduction of wealthy dynas- rapher or produce sensitive, rich ethnographic ties (Marcus 2000: 26; but see Sklair, this issue). work (see below). It is this postcritical turn, most In the wake of Piketty, it is perhaps clearer than visible in anthropological work with groups that ever that ethnographies of kinship and inher- might be considered “elite,” that the contributors itance that divorce themselves from political- to this theme section wish to confront. Ethnographic engagements with global elites | 3

Aims of the theme section jection of the language of class or capital (e.g., Barry and Slater 2002). Th is is perhaps a conse- Rather than choose between a distanced, criti- quence of sociologists concerned with fi nancial cal political-economic perspective on elites and expertise and the minutiae of sociotechnical an intimate ethnographic approach that whisks agencements working in “the shadow of older political economy out of sight, the contributors Marxist frameworks that have traditionally ig- to this issue would rather engage with ethical, nored or belittled these [fi nancial] complexities political, and analytical challenges posed by and reduced them to merely the contingent, su- studying both critically and ethnographically in perstructural ephemera of the ‘real’ economic global elite settings. Th ese settings include the base” (Haiven 2014: 24). And yet, just as the “Alpha Territories” of London, where wealthy expertise of fi nancial and policy elites is always families reproduce themselves and their cap- animated by charismatic, racialized, gendered, ital through highly gendered forms of labor or classed projects (Bear et al. 2015), it is also (Glucksberg, this issue); the family homes of implicated in the further generation of inequal- a wealthy Brazilian family concerned with re- ities (see Gilbert, this issue). producing its members as “socially responsible” As Don Kalb (2015: 14–19) has argued in industrialists (Sklair, this issue); and the private the recently published Anthropologies of Class: sector development initiatives that emerge in Power, Practice, and Inequality, “extraction and the encounters between development offi cials exploitation may well, in the famous ‘last in- based in London and factory owners based in stance’ depend on surplus labor in production,” Dhaka (Gilbert, this issue). but studying class anthropologically demands a Th e fi rst aim of this theme section is to pro- more open terminology and analytical frame. vide an anthropological response to the recent For James Carrier (2015: 38), studying class revival of sociological (e.g., Savage 2015) interest anthropologically involves paying attention to in global elites whose occupation of “the most those situations where the relations that people infl uential positions or roles in the important depend on in order to improve their lives are spheres of social life” (Shore 2002: 4) is increas- the very same relations that hinder and obstruct ingly structured by the wealth, mobility, and those projects of improvement (see also Glucks- enclaving that allow them to divorce themselves berg, this issue). Indeed, we refer in this theme from the constraints of public institutions (Da- section to the ethnography of “global elites” not vies 2017)—even while they may exercise power to signal a retreat from the language of class and through them. Th e theme section contributes to exploitation and a turn toward the language of the still nascent anthropology of elites (see Sal- privilege, distinction, and advantage; rather, we verda and Abbink 2013: 8), which has recently do so in order to refl ect the open-ended ethno- begun to move away from questions of recruit- graphic projects from which the articles assem- ment and succession (Pina-Cabral and Pedroso bled here arise. In short, we did not set out to fi t de Lima 2000; Shore 2002: 13) to examine the our ethnography into a prepackaged language processes of elite formation among privileged of class. Instead, we found that fi eldwork with professional groups (Pirie and Rogers 2013) elites who—in Cris Shore’s (2002) terms—oc- and newly mobile, transnational corporate and cupy the most infl uential positions or roles in fi nancial classes (Bourgouin 2013). social life threw up unavoidable concerns about A second aim for this collection is to address exploitation, inequality, and the inverse inter- the lack of attention to class-based inequalities dependent welfare principle that the postcriti- in existing anthropological studies of “elites” (cf. cal sensibilities of existing work on global elites Savage and Williams 2008). Th e rise of ethno- (broadly conceived) seem to whisk out of sight. graphic studies of fi nancial and corporate “elites” But just as the study of class in sociology has has oft en been accompanied by a vociferous re- been largely divorced from the study of elites, so 4 | Paul Robert Gilbert and Jessica Sklair too in anthropology has the recent return to the to capture by ethnographic tools, which means study of class, spearheaded by Carrier and Kalb that it is necessary to complement them with (2015), by and large focused on what might methods derived from history, in particular once have been termed the working class—not- world history, and journalism, as Eric Wolf withstanding some passing references to the knew well.” But what we hope to highlight here business class (Kalb 2015: 18) and the transna- is that there is an increasing number of ethnog- tional capitalist class (Neveling 2015: 167). Sim- raphers who have carried out fi eldwork in elite ilarly, Rachel Stryker and Roberto González’s settings. Th e articles in this theme section show (2014) eff orts to resuscitate Laura Nader’s that empirical, ethnographic work on wealthy (1972) project of “studying up” through “ver- elites oft en sets in motion inquiries that invite tical slices” of society—such that, for instance, or necessitate attention to the maintenance and the organizational culture of an insurance fi rm perpetuation of inequalities, and so to capital could be causally related to residence patterns, understood as a relation rather than as the mere credit access, and life chances in starkly divided hoarding of wealth. Yet the political, ethical, and urban areas—have largely consisted of study- analytical implications of this state of aff airs has ing “down” ethnographically and projecting the largely gone unremarked upon, since, as noted critical anthropological imagination “upward” earlier, there has developed something of a di- (but see Ou 2014). vision of labor between those who engage with At the same time, it is more common than class analysis as they “study down while look- ever for anthropologists to carry out long-term ing up” and those who work ethnographically ethnographic work inside fi nancial institutions in elite contexts but who reject the language of (Riles 2011a), central banks (Holmes 2013), the class, inequality, or even critique (see below). World Bank (Mosse 2011), public-private devel- Th is is not to say, of course, that an anthropolog- opment partnerships (Guyer 2011), diplomatic ical analysis of class-based exploitation can be corps (Neumann 2012), and even the World rooted in ethnographic work carried out in elite Trade Organization (WTO) (Deeb and Marcus settings alone. Th e accounts of ethnographers 2011). With few exceptions, this work has either working with those whose welfare is in a direct avoided or explicitly rejected class- and inequal- and inversely interdependent relation with the ity-based analyses of these elite professional elites we write about must also be drawn into and political domains, focusing instead on the our analysis (see Gilbert, this issue). personal (see Harrison 2013) and technical or Th is brings us to the fi nal and central aim expertise-based aspects of elite experience. It is, of the theme section: to examine the necessary however, these personal and technical capacities and possible relationship between ethnographic that may be translated into income inequalities work with elites and critical analysis of the (and even inequalities in inherited wealth), set- way in which elite projects of social reproduc- ting corporate and fi nancial elites apart from tion—the generation of aff ective and intimate those less mobile, wealthy, or insulated from connections, and the exercising of professional precarity. capacities—translate into unequal distributions It has oft en been noted that conventional eth- of wealth, power, stability, and mobility. Our nographic methods contingent on “being there” principal concern lies with interrogating what are troubled by studying elite cultures and con- Lisette Josephides (2015a, 2015b) has recently texts (Shore 2002: 11). Shore (2011: 173) has termed the “requirements and obligations” of identifi ed a need for “rethinking the relation- ethnographic research. For Josephides, obliga- ship between fi eldwork and the generation of tions accrue in the process of formulating and anthropological data” when attempting to study circulating ethnographic knowledge, since “em- policy and military elites, and Kalb (2015: 18) pathy is constitutive of anthropological knowl- has noted that powerful business elites are “hard edge, being essential to knowing the other” and Ethnographic engagements with global elites | 5

“the experience of fi eldwork forces the eth- whose well-being and capacity for social repro- nographer into relations of dependence which duction is interdependent with that of our elite displace preconceived diff erences of status and interlocutors? power” (2015b: 55). Knowledge itself, however, because of disciplinary and other formal con- ventions, imposes certain requirements on eth- Ethnography and/or critique? nographic writing, and as such there is always a risk of “betrayal” (2015a: 3; see also Mosse We are particularly troubled fi rst by the emer- 2006). Fieldwork carried out alongside some gence of a particular set of explicitly anticritical of the most powerful or infl uential individu- norms associated with the elite and multisited als in society may amplify, rather than entirely anthropology of the contemporary (which is displace, preconceived diff erences of status and associated with George Marcus and Paul Rab- power; where they do not, this may have more inow and their colleagues), second by the recent to do with our own diff erential incorporation postcritical turn in anthropology, which draws into a variety of elite settings. on perspectives from actor-network theory (see In this vein, Carrier draws a distinction be- esp. Latour 2004), and third by the putative tween empathy and sympathy in the fi eldwork ethnographic ideals that have been enunciated encounter. He defi nes empathy as the “core of particularly by proponents of the “ontological interpretative understanding” and argues that turn” (Kohn 2016) in anthropology. In some this sentiment does not necessitate that the cases, it appears that proponents of an anti- or researcher like or feel “an identity” with those postcritical ethnographic style have relied on they encounter in the fi eld. Sympathy, however, “ethnographic engagement” as a substitute for “speaks of attachment or aff ection, a degree of the explicit articulation of political subjectivi- identifi cation with someone else.” Carrier iden- ties that may be acquired before, during, or aft er tifi es a shift from empathy to sympathy among fi eldwork. In the process, diverse political com- anthropologists over recent decades, in which mitments may be disguised as mere functions “there seems some tendency to elevate sympa- of the obligations and requirements of ethno- thy from a personal sentiment to something graphic knowledge production. What we hope like a disciplinary expectation” (2016b: 51). to make clear in this theme section is that we are Th is shift in expectations regarding the way in not arguing for a specifi c disciplinary politics which ethnographers are required to feel about from anthropologists (cf. Graeber 2002), but the subjects of their research has made it harder, rather for the making explicit of diverse political Carrier notes, to study and “think analytically” positions and projects that shape ethnographic about both those of whom one approves and knowledge production and that cannot reason- those of whom one does not. ably be dissolved into an inherent “politics of Below, we seek to question the extent to ethnography.” which disciplinary norms such as these place particular requirements on the ethnographic knowledge that we produce through our engage- Anthropologists against studying up ments with global wealth elites, industrialist- philanthropists, and corporate elites. Should Prominent anticritical anthropologists have side- anthropologists avoid being normative? Must lined attempts to generate critical or class-based our normative commitments only be voiced refl ections on fi eldwork encounters as a vulgar— when they are aligned with the relationships and ultimately unanthropological—predilection. we forge (and depend on) during fi eldwork? If George Marcus has suggested that Nader’s (1972) our writing may betray those among whom we approach to “studying up” was too much a mat- carry out research, can it not also betray others ter of “getting the ethnographic goods” on elites, 6 | Paul Robert Gilbert and Jessica Sklair a task to which anthropologists are not “tem- work of critical anthropologists in the Mk I tra- peramentally suited.” For Marcus, studies of dition was also grounded in “a fi eldwork- (and elites ought not to identify “good guys” and/or archive-) based model in a direct lineage of tent- “bad guys,” or impose modernist theories about and-notebook anthropology” (Nugent 2012b: “global histories of relations of domination,” but 18). In contemplating the questions we posed “pose the ambiguity and messiness of any moral earlier, it is perhaps useful to remember that the position mapped onto social life across commu- critical anthropologists in the Mk I tradition nities of diff erence” (1998: 27–28). were both fully committed to the ethnographic However, as shown in refl ective analysis on tradition and rarely afraid of being normative. the recent history of anthropology—such as For Paul Rabinow, George Marcus, James that provided by the volume edited by Carrier Faubion, and Tobias Rees (2008), however, Na- (2016a) and in Stephen Nugent’s (2012) intro- der’s (1972) essay on studying up and Hymes’s duction to a collection of articles reprinted from (1972) Reinventing Anthropology—the pivotal the journal Critique of Anthropology—these pro- “Critical Anthropology (Mk I)” volume in which nouncements on the appropriate politics of eth- it was contained—was a less sophisticated at- nography are grounded in broader disciplinary tempt at disciplinary critique and reform than shift s over the past half-century. Nugent (2012a) the “more consequential moment” (Marcus, charts the displacement over time of what he cited in Rabinow et al. 2008: 24) that would terms “Critical Anthropology (Mk I),” which is follow with Writing Culture (Cliff ord and Mar- a broad collection of work produced from the cus 1986). It was instead “an expression of an 1960s to 1980s that is represented in particular intention to render the discipline in the service by the articles reproduced in his edited volume of the right kind of politics” (Faubion, cited in and by Talal Asad’s (1973) Anthropology and Rabinow et al. 2008: 22). In the shift away from the Colonial Encounter and Dell Hymes’s (1972) an earlier tradition of critique, as Jeff Maskovsky Reinventing Anthropology. Th ese last two vol- and Ida Susser (2016: 156) note, “adherents of umes were situated in both political-economic political-economic critical anthropology are fre- critique and an (interconnected) awareness of quently treated as old-school radicals who some- the particular global and historical relations how missed the 1980s memos on the fallacies of that gave birth to the discipline and continued totalising narratives.” to inform it. From the mid-1980s, however, the Our concern in this themed section is not ascendance of “New Critical Anthropology (Mk to declare back at anticritical ethnographers of II)” served to undermine the political-economic elites, “We speak truth to power, while you are a focus of this earlier work. Th is new anthropol- pawn of neoliberal interests” (Felski 2015: 186). ogy was based on three infl uential trends: the Rather, we want to trouble the idea that the re- Geertz-inspired “interpretive” approach to quirements and obligations of ethnographic the anthropological study of culture; the post- writing require deference and the absence of cri- structuralist turn (grounded in postmodernist tique, or that referring to class-like relations that and literary critiques of ethnographic writing), reproduce inequality necessarily means moving and the “emergence of a generic idiom of ‘glo- further away from ethnographic understanding balization’ [in which] attempts to specify hier- in order to debunk or reveal the operation of a archies of causality (e.g., ‘it is the economic in concealed structural power. Even more, we want the last instance’) are silenced by appeals to a to insist that the politics of ethnographers work- rule-changing, one-world-market of neoliberal ing in elite settings—however radical, liberal, or fantasy” (Nugent 2012b: 15). conservative—be made explicit and that they Th e claims made for the role of ethnography not be disguised through a putatively shared in this ascendant New Critical Anthropology politics of ethnographic engagement. It is, af- (Mk II) have tended to overlook the fact that the ter all, not without consequence that the New Ethnographic engagements with global elites | 7

Right anthropologist Mark Dyal (2012) advises (Deeb and Marcus 2011: 65)? What distance is students that anthropology is an ideal discipline there here between anthropologists of the WTO in which to “discuss [far right approaches to im- and “fl at world” globalization guru Th omas migration] simply from the perspective of my Fried man, who, as Angelique Haugerud (2005: subjects—which is what anthropology is about. 107–113) observes, affi rms the “power and os- . . . Th ere was nothing my committee could say, tensible rationality of the elite architects of the really, except to understand that it was my sub- status quo” and fails to grapple with the hard- jects’ position and not my own.” felt implications of contemporary trade policy, Returning to Piketty (2014), Anush Kapa- which “as both theoretical edifi ce and societal dia has observed that the discipline of anthro- vision deserves careful scrutiny rather than pology has served as a “bizarro mirror image enshrinement”? of the discipline of economics that is equally In this theme section, we seek to restate not unhinged from economic reality and equally only the possibility but also the value and ne- incentivized to produce the baroque and pass cessity of work that is at once ethnographic and it off as knowledge.” Both anthropologists and open to the possibility of political-economic cri- economists have spent the last few decades pro- tique that takes account of the institutions and ducing “show dogs rather than hunting dogs” relations through which class-like inequalities (Kapadia 2015: 510). Piketty—for his many are reproduced. Given that there is oft en tension anthropological shortcomings—wants to hunt. between ethnographic intimacy and the terms With few exceptions (e.g., Ho 2009), contem- of political-economic critique, the contributors porary anthropologists of elites do not seem as have made their various normative orienta- concerned with the persistent generation and tions—as they both shaped or were shaped by entrenchment of inequalities in wealth, power, fi eldwork encounters—explicit. Th is in turn has and mobility. When granted ethnographic ac- required that certain disciplinary norms regard- cess to the WTO, Douglas Holmes and George ing the ethics of ethnographic fi eldwork be con- Marcus (2008: 99) take themselves as “being fronted head on. asked to participate within the ramifying imperatives of organizational experiments that seek to create an idiom through which a global Anthropology’s crisis of critique regime of liberal trade gains articulation, a pa- tois, so to speak, by which capitalism can speak In a recently published volume, Aft er the Crisis: refl exively.” Anthropological Th ought, Neoliberalism, and the But to posit this participatory relationship Aft ermath, Carrier (2016a) suggests that some as the ideal contribution of ethnography in the anthropologists share more than they might contemporary era, and to ignore the political like to imagine with the neoclassical economists complicity between ethnographer and research whose methodological and epistemological participant inherent in such a relationship, ap- shortcomings have been much discussed since pears problematic to say the least. Can we really 2008. By eschewing concern with “order or sys- accept that the obligations and requirements of tem,” focusing on ethics and values rather than ethnographic knowledge production are such politics, and abandoning a concern with bases that protests against the 2009 Geneva Ministe- of common judgment, “neoliberal” anthropol- rial constitute nothing more than “a reminder ogists have, Carrier charges, grown comfortable for those of us who sojourn amid the contradic- with a world in which “the most important thing tory scenes of placid authority and brute reality, is individuals and their personal orientations and perhaps sometimes intervene in them, that and values” (2016b: 69). As another contributor our navigations across the scales of knowledge to Aft er the Crisis notes, the injunction to take that organize contemporary life must continue” one’s ethnographic subjects seriously is oft en ad- 8 | Paul Robert Gilbert and Jessica Sklair hered to with such vigor that the anthropologist As we go on to outline below, we do not share “apologizes for being critical” (Dullo 2016: 133) this narrow reading of critique as merely a mat- of what they have observed in the fi eld. And to ter of “seeing through” or “debunking.” Indeed, be sure, ethnographic knowledge production, it seems that many ontologists or ontographers being grounded in relationships, certainly “calls also struggle to dispense with some kind of for an ethical stance” (Josephides 2015a: 1). critical stance altogether. We might ask with Th e ethnographer’s ideal ethical-epistemo- Christopher Gad and colleagues what Pedersen logical stance has frequently been depicted as (2012, cited in Gad et al. 2015: 74) meant when a matter of “yielding to the preoccupations of he claimed that an ontological analysis of far others” (Strathern 1999: 6) in such a way that right movements would entail not critique but “imposes interlocutors’ concerns and interests a “chipping” away, or why critique may be prob- upon the ethnographer” (Englund and Leach lematic to ontologists while “interference” in the 2000: 229). For Tim Ingold (2013: 6), the ideal ontologies they map and describe might be ac- anthropology would “bring ways of knowing ceptable (see Woolgard and Lezaun 2013: 326). and feeling shaped through transformational To us, it seems that the tendency for postcritical engagements with people from around the scholars to equate “critique” with a redemptive world” toward the “essentially prospective task act of unveiling concealed power by would-be of helping to fi nd a way into a future common to sociologist kings (see Felski 2015; Jensen 2014) all of us.” Th is commitment to “building com- may unwittingly serve interests other than that mon worlds anew” is also to be found in Bruno of getting closer to our ethnographic subjects’ Latour’s (2002) manifesto for a diplomatic an- meanings and practices (Fleissner 2017: 115). thropology and in work carried out under the It runs the risk of excising from view very real sign of the “ontological turn” (see Kohn 2016). agonistic interdependencies that might be best Th us, Martin Holbraad and colleagues (2014) described through a vocabulary of class, even present ontological anthropology as a matter of when these interdependencies are made man- attending to the “multiplicity of forms of exis- ifest through the understandings and practices tence enacted in concrete practices, where poli- that we encounter through ethnographic fi eld- tics becomes the non-skeptical elicitation of this work (see Gilbert, this issue). manifold of potentials for how things could be.” What we set out to respond to in this issue is Responding to this ontological turn, Lucas Bes- the specifi c problems that emerge when anthro- sire and David Bond (2014) have identifi ed a cri- pologists pursue the fulfi llment of anthropolo- sis of critique that accompanies its practitioners’ gy’s promise via the privileging of sympathy and enthusiasm for nonskeptical, sympathetic en- the rejection of critique despite (or even because counters and the pursuit of a new common fu- of) their ethnographic engagements with global ture, noting that “the turbulent present it holds elites. What happens to the ethical-epistemo- at bay is something we would still like to know logical ideals of ethnography, defended so vig- more about.” As much as the ontological turn is orously by proponents of the ontological turn, about fulfi lling anthropology’s promise to “get when fi eldwork takes you into the very kinds of our descriptions right” (Pedersen 2012) and “to organizations that proponents of the ontologi- employ a central concept and concern of Bruno cal turn (e.g., Viveiros de Castro 2015) frame as Latour—to speak about them to them in ways threats to a multiplicity of modes of existence? they do not fi nd off ensive” (Viveiros de Castro Are the rules of ethnographic engagement mod- 2015: 15), it is also about rejecting critique— ifi ed, or does one fi nd the same apologias for understood as a claim that the social-scientist/ criticality, the same injunction to yield to the observer has a better access to reality (or the preoccupations of your interlocutors? In the operation of concealed, systemic power) than work of Marcus and his colleagues—and among those among whom they study. those ethnographers of fi nance, law, and cor- Ethnographic engagements with global elites | 9 porate organization who, like the proponents pen to occupy “powerful institutional engines of the ontological turn, have drawn on Latour’s of change” hardly goes unnoticed—nor do the methodology without questioning its relation to parallels between Marcus’s anticritical turn to- his conservative political orientation (see Horn- ward collaboration and partnership and the borg 2014: 126)—it seems that anticritical ideals parallel eff orts that are made by corporate dip- are even more clearly articulated. lomats seeking to neutralize their critics (Gil- bert 2015; Rajak 2011). And, just as proponents of the ontological turn sought to fulfi ll anthro- Anthropology aft er critique? pology’s promise by “getting their descriptions right” (Pedersen 2012) and speaking to their Marcus’s long-term engagement with ethno- subjects in ways that they do not fi nd off ensive graphic method and the norms of doctoral in- (Viveiros de Castro 2015), Marcus has insisted quiry in anthropology might have begun with that in collaboration with their “epistemic part- an interest in how “canned visions of capitalism” ners,” anthropologists of the contemporary “are (1989: 18) could be replaced with ethnographi- not needed to add ‘critique,’ moral injunction, cally derived understandings of the contempo- or higher meaning to these accounts” (Holmes rary world system (Marcus 1995). But it would and Marcus 2008: 84). Rather, they should move not be long before his project was reoriented toward “a deferral to subjects’ modes of know- by a desire to be “free of the over-determining ing, a function to which ethnography has long moral economy and redemptive function of so aspired” (82). much critical writing committed to describing Annelise Riles (2011a), in her work on legal life-worlds of resistance and opposition among expertise in derivatives markets and fi nancial those categorized as marginal.” Hence, he made institutions that were “too big to fail,” has drawn the turn to those who “share some of the same on Latour (e.g., 2004) to reject explanations of privileges and modest empowerments as those law in terms of “social forces” or “norms” (Riles of us who interview and write about them” and 2011b: 33, 18). For Riles, the anthropology of are “fully inside and complicit with powerful law is excessively addicted to a view of “the ju- institutional engines of change” (2001: 2). It is ral” as a “matter of rules and norms governing immediately and forcefully apparent that Mar- rights and obligations, in contrast to the fl exible, cus’s anthropological “us” is not all-inclusive. empirical realities of economic relations.” Such Not all of us are equipped or enabled to carry an approach, Riles suggests, “assumes that the out ethnographic work within the WTO in col- jural should be apprehended in a quite diff er- laboration with its director general (see Deeb ent modality, as a target of critique rather than and Marcus 2011). Nor can it reasonably be ethnography” (34; emphasis added). Th is notion said that the ethnographic subjects discussed that critique and ethnography are incompatible in this issue—global fi nancial, wealth, and cor- or antagonistic modes of knowledge production porate elites—are possessed only of “modest” is being made increasingly explicit by a new empowerments. generation of organizational and business an- Marcus has insisted that he is “not a reac- thropologists. Writing in the Journal of Business tionary, an elitist, or even one who argues for Anthropology, Ghislaine Gallenga (2016: 10) in- elite studies as a counterbalance to the study of sists that the point of an anthropology of busi- those who suff er” (2008: 12), and has instead ex- ness ethics is “neither to speak as a moralist nor plained his project as a matter of engaging with to perform a moral evaluation of the corporate the “intellectually more active of ethnography’s world.” Likewise, Léa Porée’s (2016: 59) contri- subjects, as interlocutors and epistemic partners bution to the same journal, addressing business in research” (2012: 435). But the extent to which ethics in the advertising industry, states that her these “intellectually more active” partners hap- aim is not to assess the “relevance” or “verac- 10 | Paul Robert Gilbert and Jessica Sklair ity” of moral values proclaimed by a particular exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be fi rm’s staff : “Th is is not the role of the anthro- unveiled as a scandalous secret” (2002: 140). pologist, and it is probably pointless to try to Our point is rather that we fi nd it troubling discover if the aim of the ethics advocated is when postcritical anthropologists are willing real or not.” But must we accept—with Riles, to endorse normativity where that normativity Marcus, Latour, contributors to the Journal of emerges from a unifying “commitment to ethno- Business Anthropology, and the proponents of graphic engagement” (Yarrow and Venkatesan ontological anthropology—that ethnography 2012: 16). Here, we arrive back at the assump- is necessarily opposed to critique? Th at critique tion that appropriately ethnographic knowledge lacks the sophistication required of the ethnog- emerges from ethnographic commitment. How rapher? Making claims about the necessary op- might we expand the understanding of ethno- position of ethnography and critique—or the graphic obligations and requirements to make extent to which critique may emerge not from room for nuanced ethnographic critique? What positions taken at the outset but rather from about ethnographers whose openness to trans- ethnographic encounters—is tantamount to formative experience in the fi eld has left them dispensing with what Michael Jackson terms more critical of their interlocutors, not less? Can “ethnographic judgement.” For Jackson, such a critical stance not be committed to a priori but judgment does not emerge from “unrefl ective, emerge through ethnographic encounters? Cri- a prioristic, moralistic condemnation of diff er- tique is about far more than piercing the ideo- ence on the egocentric or ethnocentric grounds logical veil and animating crudely drawn class that alien beliefs or practices belong outside the struggles. It is perfectly possible, as several con- pale of what is human,” but rather is a “way of tributors here demonstrate, to move between doing justice to the multiplex and ambiguous the “suspicion” of critique and the “faith” of character of human reality by regarding others ethnographic intimacy, to produce knowledge not as inhuman, but as ourselves in other circum- by constantly moving between the obligations stances” (2009: 240). of the ethnographic encounter and the requirements of critique (Coleman 2015; Levitas 2013). For the contributors to this theme section, to be For a critical ethnography of elites critical or engage with critique is not to indulge in a pessimistic or self-indulgent subordina- Th e contributors to this theme section approach tion of our ethnography to dated, prepackaged the relationship between critique and ethnog- perspectives on capitalism, development, or raphy in diff erent registers. While we are un- the world system. It is rather to maintain an comfortable with the turn toward postcritical openness to the possibility that ethnographic ethnography, our response is not to simply re- fi eldwork carried out in elite settings, among spond that critique is tied to inherently libera- those holding the most infl uential positions in tory or progressive politics, nor is it to believe society, may put in motion inquiries that de- that critique reveals the “real” drivers of social mand attention to inequality, exploitation, and behavior that are otherwise disguised to non- agonistic interdependences that shape social critical social scientists (see Felski 2015: 15; reproduction. For us, to maintain an openness see also Keane 2014; Latour 2004; Yarrow and to critical language (and the language of class Venkatesan 2012). We fully appreciate the lim- and capital) is to make space for the possibility its to the politics of debunking and unveiling. of getting closer to our ethnographic subjects Eve Sedgwick rightly notes the critical limits of than might be possible where a language of unveiling where “forms of violence that are hy- class, capital, and inequality is treated a priori pervisible from the start may be off ered as an with suspicion. Ethnographic engagements with global elites | 11

Overview of the contributions a conceptual movement between experiences of mutuality common to researcher and elite re- Th e contributors here all work toward a critical search participants in the fi eld, and a wider an- ethnography of elites, one that recognizes the thropological perspective on the diff erent ways importance of intimate ethnographic encoun- in which this business’s activities have been per- ters for understanding the generation of global ceived by the family and their fi rm’s employees inequalities. Luna Glucksberg begins the theme during labor disputes in the past. section by refracting recent work on the super- Finally, Paul Robert Gilbert responds to the rich of London’s “Alpha Territories” through postcritical turn in the anthropology of devel- topics of longstanding anthropological con- opment in the context of donor agencies and cern: kinship and marriage, and the gendered multilateral development institutions increas- division of labor within the household. Th e role ingly focusing on the private sector as an engine that intimacy and caring labor plays in the re- of development. Gilbert examines the awkward production of extreme inequality is brought alignment that emerges between aid-funded in- out via Glucksberg’s juxtaposition of “women’s vestment climate reform programs designed to work” among the wives of super-rich fi nanciers render Bangladesh an easier place for foreign and caring labor among the beauticians who investors to do business, nation branding, and help to reproduce “elite wives” as appropriately investment promotion exercises carried out by feminine. In both cases, gendered labor essen- representatives of the state and brokers with tial to social reproduction is rendered invisible an interest in promoting great capital fl ows to and devalued, but as Glucksberg makes clear, Bangladesh, and locally placed factory-owning the political-economic stakes are hardly compa- business elites. Rather than attempt to explain rable. Highly gendered caring labor is no more the actions of factory-owning elites and devel- immune to analysis in terms of the “inverse in- opment professionals in terms of a concealed terdependent welfare principle” (Wright 2005) logic of capitalist development, Gilbert argues than more “productive” economic activity. that when elites explicitly acknowledge the Th e issues of elite succession and the pres- inverse interdependent welfare principle and ervation of wealth that are the focus of Glucks- their accumulation of wealth at the expense of berg’s article reemerge in the contribution by factory workers engaged in hazardous labor, it Jessica Sklair; they are now viewed through would in fact work against ethnographic under- the prism of philanthropy and corporate so- standing to not incorporate class-based patterns cial responsibility (CSR) within a Brazilian of exploitation into one’s analysis. Th inking family business. Here, carefully craft ed narra- through “complicity as a methodology,” Gilbert tives on the history of family and fi rm appeal highlights the potential for ethnographic mutu- to claims of naturalized family values of social ality to not only disable critique but also to drive responsibility and benevolence. Encompassing (sometimes oppositional) critique by setting in obvious corporate objectives, these narratives motion inquiries that depart from our subjects’ also serve a more obfuscated role within deli- own recognition of their reliance on class-like cate business succession processes, as control of antagonistic interdependencies. the family fi rm is passed down from second to third generation. In this latter context, claims to philanthropic family values emerge as key to Acknowledgments attempts by the family to maintain control over the business on which the reproduction of its We would like to thank the University of Sussex wealth and elite status depends. In this analysis, Researcher-Led Initiative and the contributors Sklair’s critical ethnographic approach requires to the January 2016 workshop “Confronting 12 | Paul Robert Gilbert and Jessica Sklair

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