The will sits at the heart of everyday life for billions of people. Religious revival, democratization, and economic restructuring, to name but a few worldwide processes, routinely invoke the will of the people and the will of God while promoting … Continue reading “Introduction: Politically Unwilling”
Issue: Issue 120 Politically Unwilling
On Liberation: Crack, Christianity, and Captivity in Postwar Guatemala City
Kevin Lewis O'NeillA will to escape organizes the practice of Latin American Christian liberation while at the same time enacting a new genre of captivity. After a shift in US interdiction efforts, the vast majority of cocaine produced in the Andes for … Continue reading “On Liberation: Crack, Christianity, and Captivity in Postwar Guatemala City”
S’More Inequality: The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education
Bethany MoretonCognitive psychology—“the mind’s new science” of the last several decades—has directed both popular and scholarly attention to the cultivation of individual willpower as a tool of personal maximization. The Stanford marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification among preschoolers serves as a … Continue reading “S’More Inequality: The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education”
The Will to What?: Class, Time, and Re-Willing in Post-Soviet Russia
Tomas MatzaThe return of the psychological in the post-Soviet period has not only rewired the will and its relationship to psychological models of the feeling subject but also helped affix subjectivity to expectations of successful or unsuccessful self-transformation in competitive conditions. … Continue reading “The Will to What?: Class, Time, and Re-Willing in Post-Soviet Russia”
Short Cuts: Metabolic Surgery and Gut Attachments in India
Harris SolomonThis article addresses the phenomenon of metabolic surgery in urban India, an intervention designed to address the metabolic diseases of obesity and diabetes. While consumptive willpower grounds prescriptions for changes in lifestyle, such as diet and exercise, metabolic surgery poses … Continue reading “Short Cuts: Metabolic Surgery and Gut Attachments in India”
In the Men’s Room: E. B. Tylor and the Will to Systematize
John Lardas ModernThe anthropologist E. B. Tylor conjured the will as the latent promise of freedom against a backdrop of technological innovation, colonial aspirations, Victorian spiritualism, the cybernetic gestures of Charles Babbage, and theories of primitive arithmetic. Through his “science of culture,” … Continue reading “In the Men’s Room: E. B. Tylor and the Will to Systematize”
Regimes of Self-Improvement: Globalization and the Will to Work
Daromir RudnyckyjThis article examines two projects of subjectification that seek to inculcate a will to work that animates contemporary globalization. Based on ethnographic research at Krakatau Steel, one of Indonesia’s largest state-owned companies, the article contrasts the differing implementation of the … Continue reading “Regimes of Self-Improvement: Globalization and the Will to Work”