Anti-Crisis: thinking with and against crisis excerpt from interview with Janet Roitman

Abstract

On what epistemological grounds can we declare ‘crisis’? How does such a diagnosis relate to representations of history, and to the pragmatics of markets and politics? These questions are at the heart of Janet Roitman's scholarship, which focuses on emergent economic and political forms. Her early work (Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa, 2005) analyzed the formation of new figures of economic regulation and illustrates how state structures persist despite (or due to) the proliferation of unregulated networks, thus calling into question analyses in terms of ‘failed states’ or state crisis. She then deepened her analysis by considering the conceptual foundations of persistent analyses of Africa in terms of crisis. This concern led to an inquiry into the status of the concept of crisis in the social sciences, generating her second book: Anti-Crisis (2013). Anti-Crisis takes the 2007–2008 ‘financial crisis’ as an exemplar and shows how the concept of crisis constitutes a blind spot in social science analysis. We took the opportunity to revisit this intellectual trajectory, to probe her analysis of the concept of crisis and consider the avenues of research she opened up. 1