Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting disparate discussions in the anthropology of migration, economic anthropology and political anthropology. This edited collection provides a novel and systematic conceptualization of Deservingness and shows how it can serve as a prime and integrative conceptual prism to ethnographically explore transforming welfare states, regimes of migration, as well as capitalist social reproduction and relations at large.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Deservingness: Reassessing the Moral Dimensions of Inequality
Andreas Streinzer and Jelena Tošić
Part I: Deservingness – Genealogies, Struggles and Ideologies
Chapter 1. Caring for the Old and Letting Them Die: A Political Economy of Human Worth
Susana Narotzky
Chapter 2. Must the Tired and Poor ´Stand on Their Own Two Feet`? Tools for Analyzing How Migrants’ Deservingness is Reckoned
Sarah S. Willen and Jennifer Cook
Chapter 3. Deserving Classes without Class: Explaining the Neo-Nationalist Ascendency
Don Kalb
Chapter 4. A Methodological, Reflexive and Comparative Approach to Deservingness
Erik Bähre
Part II: Categories, Policies and Negotiations of Deservingness
Chapter 5. Hartz IV. Affective and Sensual Registers of Moral Inferiority
Stefan Wellgraf
Chapter 6. Unemployment, Deservingness and Ideological Apparatuses: A Case Study from Turin, Italy
Carlo Capello
Chapter 7. The Politics of Austerity Welfare: Charity, Discourses of Deservingness and Human Needs in a Portuguese Church Parish
Patricia Matos
Chapter 8. ‘Here, Morality is a Sense of Entitlement’: Citizenship, Deservingness, and Inequality in Suburban America
Elisa Lanari
Part III: The (Un)Deserving Migrant/Refugee
Chapter 9. Ambivalences of (Un)Deservingness: Tracing Vulnerability in the EU Border Regime
Sabine Strasser
Chapter 10. The Politics of Deservingness among Resettled Bhutanese Refugees
Nicole Hoellerer
Chapter 11. Suffering and Vulnerability Reconfigured. Refugee Images of Hungarian Migrants Working in Refugee Accommodation Institutions in Germany
Ildikó Zakariás and Margit Feischmidt
Part IV: Debt Relations – State, Market Actors and Debtors
Chapter 12. Do Mortgagors in Hardship Deserve Debt Relief? Legitimizing and Challenging Inequality during the Spanish Home Repossessions Crisis
Irene Sabaté
Chapter 13. Households on Trial: Over-Indebtedness, State and Moral Struggles in Greece
Theodora Vetta
Chapter 14. Victims, Patriots and Middle Class: The (Un)Deservingness of Debtors in Post–Credit Boom Croatia
Marek Mikuš
Afterword: Differentiating Deservingness
James G. Carrier
Index
About the Author :
Jelena Tošić is Assistant Professor of Transcultural Studies at the University of St. Gallen and lecturer at the University of Vienna. Her current writings focus on borderlands in Southeast Europe, forced migration, citizenship and moralisations of inequality.
Review :
“Ethnographies of deservingness is timely, refreshing, and, in terms of the trend it foretells, devastating in equal measure…Ultimately, this volume cogently delivers a cohesive yet varied story of how the mandate of deservingness is embedded ever-deeper in Euro-American social fabric, shoring up existing hierarchies, maintaining existing power structures, and ensuring their continuance.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“This is an excellent collection that has a coherence that is rare in edited volumes. It makes a major contribution to social scientific understandings of inequality through its focus on categorisations of ‘deservingness’. In what I think is a brilliant move, it combines conceptual and historical analysis with a focus on three themes that are rarely brought together in a single volume, namely: social welfare, migration and personal/household debt.” • Paul Stubbs, Former Co-President of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy of the American Anthropological Association
“The book addresses the concept of deservingness from different points of view. The four main parts of the book are rich in ethnography, have a strong theoretical background and offer to the reader a panoramic view that takes into consideration the (un)deservingness as a processual and relational notion rather than a condition.” • Georgeta Stoica, Université de La Réunion
