Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism

The anthropology of neoliberalism has become polarised between a hegemonic economic model anchored by variants of and an insurgent approach fuelled by derivations of the Foucaultian notion of . Both conceptions obscure what is ‘neo’ about neoliberalism: the reengineering and redeployment of the state as the core agency that sets the rules and fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to realising markets. Drawing on two decades of field‐based inquiries into the structure, experience and political treatment of urban marginality in advanced society, I propose a between these two approaches that construes neoliberalism as an that harnesses the first to impose the stamp…