By Brenda Chalfin
In Neoliberal Frontiers, Brenda Chalfin provides an ethnographic exam of the daily practices of the officers of Ghana’s Customs carrier, exploring the impression of neoliberal restructuring and integration into the worldwide economic system on Ghanaian sovereignty. From the unveiling vantage aspect of the Customs workplace, Chalfin discovers a desirable inversion of our assumptions approximately neoliberal transformation: bureaucrats and native functionaries, govt places of work, checkpoints, and registries are usually held to be the ambitions of reform, yet Chalfin unearths that those figures and websites of authority act because the engine for alterations in country sovereignty. Ghana has served as a version of reform for the neoliberal institution, making it a terrific website for Chalfin to discover why the restructuring of a country at the international outer edge portends shifts that take place in all corners of the area. right away a foray into overseas political economic system, politics, and political anthropology, Neoliberal Frontiers is an cutting edge interdisciplinary breakthrough for ethnographic writing, in addition to an eloquent addition to the literature on postcolonial Africa.
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Additional resources for Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa
Example text
Chapter 6 takes the operations of the Customs Service at Ghana’s Tema Harbor, the country’s primary port and most active and profitable commercial frontier, as its centerpiece. Since independence Tema has been transformed from a fishing harbor and industrial site to an international trade-hub accommodating global shipping lines, cargo carriers, and logisÂ� tics firms in order to serve the West African coast and subregion. The case of Tema brings into focus the outsourcing of state operations, the increasing reliance on information technologies and other forms of virtual communication, and the growing breadth of multilateral directives—all critical dimensions of neoliberal intervention.
Attuned to the enduring significance of this logic of rule in the African case, Frederick Cooper (2002, 5) has gone so far as to define African states as “gatekeeper polities”: “Colonial States had been gatekeeper states. ”11 The paired history of Customs in both the colonial and imperial realm make it evident that Customs regimes are an implicit—if not fundamental—feature of the modern state apparatus in the global north as well as global south, both overlooked and sorely undertheorized. The reach and continuity of Customs regimes over time and space point to fiscal administration (territorially based forms of commercial extraction, to use Tilly’s terms) as a key pillar of modern state sovereignty.
4 This is evident in Douglass North’s (1981, 148) by now–classic assessment that “[t]he interplay between the government and its subjects with respect to the expansion of the state’s right to tax was particularly important” (italics in original) to the dynamics of state formation in early modern Europe. Drawing on Mann’s (1986) notion of infrastructural power, Mitchell Dean (1996, 147) likewise sees taxation as a political technology crucial to the production of the state effect, that is, a perception of an overarching governmental apparatus, external to and ruling over society.