City, Environment, and Transnationalism in the Philippines

Reconceptualizing "the Social" from the Global South

Koki Seki

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000598988
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Scienze sociali
• Sous-sujet: Sociologia

Seki presents an ethnography of uncertainty and precarity experienced by people in urban, rural, and transnational, communities in the Philippines as a case study of social protection without the possibility of a robust welfare state.

He deals with topics including urban poverty, environmental degradation, and transnational migration. Throughout these chapters, Seki elaborates on the modes of security and protection that people living at the margins of global capitalism create through mobilizing their sociality and networks. He traces the emerging configuration of "the social, " a collectivity and connectedness that ensures a sense of security in life among people. The social can be defined as an idea or institution, which had enabled formal and impersonal solidarity such as that which provided the underpinnings of the modern welfare states of the West during the mid-20th century. In the twenty-first century the social in this context is experiencing a fundamental reconfiguration as it faces deepening insecurity, risk, and the precariousness of the post-Welfare State or post-Fordist regime. What are the contours of the social emerging in an "unlikely place" of the Philippines amid contemporary insecurity and precariousness?

A vital resource for scholars of the Philippines, and of anthropology and social policy in the Global South more widely.

1IntroductionTowards the “Vernacular Public Sphere” in the Global South

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003224273-1

This book has a two-pronged task: to identify the process of neoliberal restructuring of “the social” observed in the social policies and development in the Global South, and to discuss what kind of alternative public sphere, which will be conceptualised as a “vernacular public sphere” later in this introduction, is emerging in such restructuring. In this study, “the social” is considered as an assemblage of ideas and institutions to nurture mutuality and solidarity for the security of people’s lives. It is based on the formal and impersonal mutuality that lies at the basis of redistribution, under which, people accept that the money they earn will be paid for services to someone they have never known or met. Originally, in the history of the West, “the social” was “invented” to deal with various risks found in the process of industrialization during the 19th century in Western Europe (Donzelot 1984).¹ Accordingly, mutual associations, insurance, and social welfare were institutionalised to mitigate the risks of industrialised society, which could no longer be tackled by mutuality based on primordial attachments, such as those among kinsmen and neighbours, or based on charity from the wealthy or the Church. Under contemporary globalization, however, and particularly with the progress of the neoliberal restructuring of “the social”, widespread arguments have emerged on the “withdrawal”, “shrinking”, “loss”, and “collapse” of “the social”. Although the potential contours of alternative institutions and ideas after such restructuring remain unclear, we are increasingly reminded that our existence faces precarity and uncertainty, particularly by unpredictable incidents, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It is hence an urgent task to reimagine and reconceptualise “the social” in times of precarity and uncertainty. The present work deals squarely with this task by shedding light on the emergence of the alternative public sphere in the Global South.

The different historical paths and discrepant experiences of modernity between the West and Global South do not necessarily indicate that “the social” is absent in the latter. Even without the welfare state established in modern Western countries, various social policies and development projects, accompanied by nation-state building, indicate attempts to expand and strengthen “the social”. This work maintains that the reconceptualization of “the social” from an unexpected place of the Global South sheds new light on the issues of mutuality, solidarity, and security for not only the Global South, but also the Global North.

As such an “unexpected place”, this book focuses on the Philippines as an ethnographic field. In particular, it presents an ethnography of the communities, both local and transnational, and the connectedness of the people, which interact with various social policies and development projects. While the question of how a welfare state can be built as an embodiment of “the social” in the Philippines and other parts of the Global South is quite intriguing and significant to ask, it is beyond the purpose of this book, and beyond my ability as well, to make practical policy recommendations regarding the institutional aspects of the welfare of the people. Rather, this book attempts to decentralise the model of “the social”, which has been based on the experience of the modern West, by examining the concrete ethnographies of development and globalization in the Philippines. In other words, I attempt to “provincialize” (Chakrabarty 2000) the seemingly universal concept of “the social” by showing that it is always bound by local specificity and emerges as situated knowledge. Through this, while avoiding privileging the concept rooted in the specific history and space of the modern West, this book sheds light on the plurality and multivocal character of this concept, as well as the rich possibilities inherent in it.

Invention of “the Social”

As has been convincingly discussed by those scholars as Donzelot and Castel, “the social” as an assemblage of ideas and institutions had been “invented” in the specific historical experience of Western Europe since the mid-19th century and developed and established by the mid-20th century. Historically, it was an ideology that called for solidarity to deal collectively with risks that had been newly found in the process of rapid industrialization in Western Europe during this period. Castel (2003), for example, argued that the place of “the social” had been clearly noticed for the first time in the 1830s, particularly in France, when pauperism became prevalent as a “social question”. Donzelot, on the other hand, emphasises the importance of the February Revolution of 1848 in France in terms of the invention of “the social” (Donzelot 1988). According to him, the cause of the Revolution was the widely shared recognition among the people regarding the contradiction between the formal equality of the citizens promised by the French Revolution on one hand, and the actual mass poverty seen among the labourers on the other. Thus, “the social” was invented as a solution to this contradiction between the promise of the republic and the misery of the people.

This “social question” was closely connected to “an awareness of the living conditions of populations who were both the agents and the victims of the industrial revolution”, and was “the question of the place to be occupied by the most desocialized fringes of workers in an industrial society” (Castel 2003: xx).

The discovery of “social questions” was at the same time the discovery of new risks arising from the environment of factory work and urban life in particular, such as accidents, injuries, diseases, mass poverty, and unemployment. These risks are no longer covered by the “primary sociability” argued by Castel (2003: 10) such as family, the community, or religious and charitable organizations, which provided the “protection of proximity”, meaning a “system of rules linking directly the members of a group on the basis of their familial belonging, locality, work, and by weaving networks of interdependence without the mediation of particular institutions” (Castel 2003: 10). Compared with this “protection of proximity” based on “primary sociability”, or informal and personal mutuality, protection by “the social” enabled the formal and impersonal mutuality that was institutionalised in the social state or welfare state in the early part of the 20th century in the West, which matured into a stable regime by the 1970s.² Through this process, “the social” was embodied into a system that enabled risks to be insured and managed collectively by people who shared national solidarity and identity.

“The Social” as Governmentality

As another important aspect of “the social”, it should be mentioned that it represents not only ideas and institutions to protect life and security, but also an aspect of power to govern people. In this sense, “the social” contains ambivalent power relations. On the one hand, it is the workings of power that protect our lives and enable us to be freed from various constraints. On the other hand, it makes us governable subjects by disciplining, normalising, and controlling our lives. As pointed out by Tanaka, a political scientist, the expansion of “the social” liberates the individual from dependence on, and bondage to, various traditional groups, such as the community and family, yet, it also re-embeds them in new social relations, under which they are disciplined to become conducive to the maintenance of social order (Tanaka 2006: 256). In other words, the individual is guaranteed the right to survive by being conducive to such social order, while at the same time, their everyday lives, including education, hygiene, food and nutrients, and relationships among families and friends, are meticulously monitored and collectively controlled so that they become responsible for minimizing various risks that would be a threat to the social order (Tanaka 2006: 180). Simply put, “the social” is an assemblage of the ambivalent powers of “liberation” and “disciplining” (Tanaka 2006). In a similar vein, anthropologist Majima argues that inherent in “the social” is the ambivalence of “oppressive disciplining” and “emancipating freedom”, “subjection” and “subjectification”, and “bureaucratization” and “solidarity” (Majima 2006). What is needed is a framework for deciphering the complicated entanglement of disciplining and freedom and subjection and subjectification as a duality inherent in “the social”.

Such aspect of ambivalent power of “the social” is also discussed by Dean (2010), who states that the reconfiguration of “the social” today is accompanied by the emergence of a new disposition of power and subjects. Under this disposition, the subject is “a free subject of need, desire, rights, interests and choice” (Dean 2010: 193). Such freedom, however, has subjection as a condition. Dean argues that “in order to act freely, the subject must first be shaped, guided and moulded into one capable of responsibility exercising that freedom through systems of domination” (Dean 2010: 193). In other words, a free subject becomes possible only when it is steered, taught, and forged to bear the responsibility for exercising freedom. As free subjects, non-state actors such as individuals, families, neighbourhood associations, and communities are empowered, activated, and motivated on one hand. On the other hand, the performance of these actors is monitored, measured, and rendered calculable by various “norms, standards, benchmarks, performance indicators, quality controls and best practice standards” under this new disposition of power and subjects (Dean 2010: 193).

In considering “the social” as an assemblage to govern people, the concept of governmentality coined by Foucault provides compelling analytical importance for this work. According to Foucault, governmentality is a form of power that originated in the political economy of liberalism emerging in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To govern the population, it does not take the form of a “regulatory system of injunction, imperatives, and interdictions” (Foucault 2009: 352), but rather it aims to “arouse, to facilitate, and to laisser faire, in other words to manage and no longer to control through rules and regulations” (Foucault 2009: 353). For Foucault, the aim of governmentality is not to disturb the natural processes of the population, economy, and society by “clumsy, arbitrary and blind intervention”, but rather to ensure natural regulation to work in such a way that those natural phenomena “do not veer off course” (Foucault 2009: 353). As such, governmentality is a mode of power that utilises and mobilises the natural processes inherent in the population, economy, and society that were found to have their own autonomous functions and mechanisms, particularly in the historical processes of urbanization and industrialization in Western Europe since the end of the 18th century.

As already made clear, governmentality differs from the government by empirical institutions such as law, administration, or the state; it is “a way of framing human actions to be guided in a certain direction” (Yoneya 1996: 81), especially through “educating desires and configuring habits, aspirations and beliefs” (Li 2007a: 5). Thus, governmentality can be understood broadly as “a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons” (Gordon 1991: 2). Foucault himself states that governmentality does not “refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather, it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed” (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1983: 221). It is directed towards various populations, as in “the government of children, of souls, of communities, and of families, of the sick” (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1983: 221). Government in this sense does not “only cover the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection, but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others” (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1983: 221).

The concept of governmentality urges us to reconsider fundamentally the conventional view of power. Governmentality is not power emanating from the “centre” or the “above”, but rather “a form of power that regulates social life from its interior” (Hardt & Negri 2000: 23). It works not through a unidirectional vector of domination and subordination, but as a sort of magnetic field that entangles all actors alike and makes their lives possible. In other words, governmentality is not a power that oppresses, exploits, or constrains, but rather a power that produces and reproduces life itself, through which society, the economy, and the population as a whole are animated. To put it differently, the paradigm of power inherent in governmentality is biopower, described by Foucault as something qualitatively different from conventional sovereign-juridical power, which is “exercised mainly as a means of deduction, a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on the subjects” (Foucault 1990: 136). In contrast to sovereign-juridical power, biopower is “a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (Foucault 1990: 137). As Negri and Hart state, “the highest function of this power is to invest life through and through, and its primary task is to administer life” (Hardt & Negri 2000: 24). It is a power that aims to make people live rather than threaten them with death, and it demonstrates its effectivity by guiding them towards how to live a “better life” through a mixture of discipline, surveillance, and control.

What is significant to note here is that on the one hand, a regime of biopower works to “make people live”, while on the other hand, those who do not follow, or are perceived as “unfit” to the regime, are “let die” (Li 2009). Whether such power is “good” or “bad” is not actually relevant to ask in the context of the present argument (Higaki 2011: 11–12). Whether it is good or bad, we have already and always lived in, and been entangled with, such a field of power. Rather, the questions to ask are as follows. What is produced and reproduced by such power? What is failed to be produced? And what, as well as who, is marginalised or even left to die under such a regime of power? Similarly, the question of “who” holds power does not make sense here. Rather, the questions are “how”, and “in what way”, does power flow and operate?

“The social” as argued in this book is considered to be a realm permeated by the power of governmentality delineated above. The actions and behaviours of each one of us entangled in this realm are framed and guided by the subtle workings of power that infiltrate all corners of everyday life in order for us to be moulded into governable, or self-governing, subjects. As such, “the social” is a regime of governmentality as a power that works to produce subjects capable of dealing with contemporary precarity and uncertainty, not through command and regulation, but through structuring the environment in which we, as free actors, navigate to act.

Neoliberal Restructuring of “the Social”

The rise of neoliberalism in the contemporary world resulted in the fundamental restructuring of “the social” as governmentality and biopower discussed so far. Here, I delineate first how neoliberalism and governmentality penetrate each other to constitute the contemporary regime of power. I then argue how “the social” as a mode of intervention by the government was restructured with the progress of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism, according to Harvey, is “a theory of political and economic practices that propose that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2005: 2). However, neoliberalism is not only a theory of political economy, but also a power that penetrates into the most internal and intimate spheres of our being, such as relationships with others, identity, and personality. It is a power that shapes the self and being according to a certain logic of political economy. Foucault describes the implication of neoliberalism on our being as a “generalization of the ‘enterprise’ form” that “involves extending the economic model of supply and demand and of investment-costs-profit so as to make it a model of social relations and of existence itself, a form of relationship of the individuals to himself, time, those around him, the group, and the family” (Foucault 2008: 242). As the thing that is brought out by this power of neoliberalism penetrating into our most personal relationships, life itself becomes a “permanent enterprise” and society is given a new form based on the model of enterprise “down to the fine grain of its texture” (Foucault 2008: 241). Hence, neoliberalism precisely becomes an object of anthropological inquiry as a cultural device to shape individuals and society according to the norms and values optimal for the self-regulating market, such as self-help, self-reliance, resilience, self-responsibility, self-activation, self-monitoring, entrepreneurship, audit, evaluation, and accountability.

Now, it is widely recognised that the rapid and widespread penetration of neoliberalism in Europe and the US since the late 1970s has led t...