The Economy of Hope 9780812293500

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
The Economy of Hope: An Introduction
Chapter 1. A Sociological Approach to Hope in the Economy
Chapter 2. Mercantilist- Utopian Projects in Eighteenth-Century Sweden
Chapter 3. Hope Turned Upside Down: How the Prospects for a Communist Utopia Were Dashed in 1950s Romania
Chapter 4. Hope and Society in Japan
Chapter 5. Is the Law Hopeful?
Chapter 6. When and How Does Hope Spring Eternal in Personal and Popular Economics? Th oughts from West Africa to America
Chapter 7. Obama’s Hope: An Economy of Belief and Substance
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Economy of Hope

THE ECONOMY OF HOPE Edited by

Hirokazu Miyazaki and

Richard Swedberg

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-4869-2

CON TEN T S

The Economy of Hope: An Introduction

1

Hirokazu Miyazaki

Chapter 1. A Sociological Approach to Hope in the Economy

37

Richard Swedberg

Chapter 2. Mercantilist-Utopian Projects in EighteenthCentury Sweden

51

Richard Swedberg

Chapter 3. Hope Turned Upside Down: How the Prospects for a Communist Utopia Were Dashed in 1950s Romania

77

Katherine Verdery

Chapter 4. Hope and Society in Japan

97

Yuji Genda

Chapter 5. Is the Law Hopeful?

126

Annelise Riles

Chapter 6. When and How Does Hope Spring Eternal in Personal and Popular Economics? Thoughts from West Africa to America

147

Jane I. Guyer

Chapter 7. Obama’s Hope: An Economy of Belief and Substance

172

Hirokazu Miyazaki

List of Contributors Index

191 193

The Economy of Hope: An Introduction Hirokazu Miyazaki

Five days after Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011, Ryu Murakami, a popular Japanese novelist and an influential opinion leader, published an op-ed piece in the New York Times, “Amid Shortages, a Surplus of Hope,” in which he stated, Ten years ago I wrote a novel in which a middle-school student, delivering a speech before Parliament, says: “This country has everything. You can find whatever you want here. The only thing you can’t find is hope.” One might say the opposite today: evacuation centers are facing serious shortages of food, water and medicine; there are shortages of goods and power in the Tokyo area as well. Our way of life is threatened, and the government and utility companies have not responded adequately. But for all we’ve lost, hope is in fact one thing we Japanese have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of many lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope. So I choose to believe. (Murakami 2011; emphasis added)1 Murakami’s op-ed piece does not simply replay a familiar and yet compelling story of hope paradoxically regained in the midst of a disaster, a crisis, or a human tragedy. It also poses many interrelated general questions

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about hope: How is hope lost and regained? What are the economic and material conditions for hope? What is the relationship between individual and collective hopes? What is the linkage between past and future hopes? How is hope anchored in belief? These questions about hope’s absence and presence, form and substance, scale, and temporality constitute what I call the economy of hope. This volume investigates this economy of hope in a broad range of economic situations and phenomena across time and space. Examples include eighteenth-century Swedish mercantilist-utopian projects, farm collectivization in mid-twentieth-century communist Romania, changing employment relations under Japan’s neoliberal reform during the fi rst decade of the twenty-first century, the pragmatic uses of legal fictions in economic law, the dynamics of innovation and replication in the West African niche economy, and Barack Obama’s 2008 political campaign of hope in the midst of the unfolding global financial crisis. What is hope? This remains a lingering and open question throughout the volume. In this book, hope is variously categorized as an affective, aesthetic, discursive, ideological, motivational, or temporal orientation, and it may at times embody some or all of these elements at once. The Economy of Hope explores these aspects and features of hope and operational uses to which the category of hope may be put in social scientific research. As a result, the definition of hope varies from chapter to chapter, and each chapter presents a different analytical commitment to the category of hope. Yet definitional struggles surrounding the category of hope are also part of the ethnographic and historical materials analyzed in each chapter. For example, at both empirical and theoretical levels, each chapter incorporates and addresses common efforts to differentiate hope from other categories, such as desire (Crapanzano 2003) and optimism (see, e.g., Deneen 1999; Lasch 1991), or to distinguish different kinds of hope from one another, such as collective versus individual hopes (see, e.g., Braithwaite 2004) and utopian versus minimalist or “residual” hopes2 (Redfield 2013: 237–40). Each chapter also at least implicitly tackles ethical questions regarding how to differentiate good hopes from bad hopes (Crapanzano 2003; see also Robbins 2013), as well as the moral philosophical problem of the proper object of hope, that is, the Kantian question of “What may I hope?” (Kant [1781] 1929). The goal of this introductory chapter is to weave together these diverse formulations of hope, and different kinds of hopes, in a way that illuminates this volume’s distinctive approach to the subject of hope.

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How, and in what terms, can hope be a subject of knowledge? What does it mean to study hope from a social scientific perspective? The economy of hope revolves around the tension between hope and knowledge, and this ultimately renders the volume’s inquiry into hope methodological. Each chapter deploys the category of hope to accomplish a specific methodological goal. In fact, what unites the volume is precisely this preoccupation with the methodological implications of hope for social scientific research (see Appadurai 2013; Miyazaki 2004; Pels 2015 for their respective arguments regarding the methodological implications of the subject of futurity). These methodological implications, including the questions of what hope is and what it means to know hope, are part of what I call the economy of hope. This reflexive dimension is a defining feature of this collective inquiry. Hope is often regarded as paradoxical in its practical deployments as well as in its analytical deployments. Hope often contains within itself its opposites, such as fear (Spinoza [1670] 2000: 215), disappointment (Bloch 1998; see also Greenberg 2014), and even despair (or loss of hope). Hope contains within itself mutually contradictory and competing elements, such as action and passivity (Crapanzano 2003; Hage 2003), confidence and patience (Pieper [1986] 1997: 100), and past and future, and each chapter of this volume embraces this profound ambiguity and paradoxicality of hope. As anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly has noted in her study of hope in medical and clinical settings, “Paradoxically, hope is on intimate terms with despair. It asks for more than life promises. It is poised for disappointment” (2010: 3). This paradoxical nature of hope can perhaps also be expressed in terms of cruelty, as Lauren Berlant has noted for what she terms cruel optimism, “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic” (2011: 24; original emphasis). Such paradoxicality affords hope its distinctive reflexivity and openness. As French philosopher Gabriel Marcel has indicated, hope is not a category that benefits from an operational definition from the outset ([1962] 2010: 23). The theme of hope is meant to continuously open one’s analytical horizon rather than close it. As Paul Ricoeur notes, “Hope is not a theme that comes after other themes, an idea that closes the system, but an impulse that opens the system, that breaks the closure of the system; it is a way of reopening what was unduly closed. In that sense it belongs to the structure of the system as such” ([1970] 1995: 211). Ernst Bloch’s formulation of hope in terms of the category of “not yet” powerfully introduces such openness to philosophy by

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reorienting philosophical inquiry from what “has already become” to what “has not yet become” ([1959] 1986). The ultimate goal of this introductory chapter is to keep such methodological openness intact while specifying the collective contribution of the volume as a whole. Indeed, it is this interplay of openness and closure in the category of hope that I seek to capture in this chapter.

Hope and Knowledge The Japanese debate about hope in which Murakami has played a key role offers a guiding image for the scope of the concept of the economy of hope and its underlying interplay of openness and closure. The debate has specifically concerned the current state and the future of the Japanese economy. It has constituted a distinctive response to a chain of radical shifts in the Japanese economy since the early 1990s: a shift from a period of rapid economic growth to contraction and stagnation following the collapse of the 1990s real estate and stock market bubble; a shift from state-sponsored economic development schemes to market-driven neoliberal reform programs in the 1980s and the 1990s (see Genda, this volume; see also Allison 2014; Genda 2001; University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Genda, and Uno 2009a, 2009b; Yamada 2004); and finally, a shift to a period of profound uncertainty intensified by Japan’s triple disaster of March 2011. The pervasive sense of blockage (heisokukan) that arose from this series of shifts has led to the rise of conservative politics, accompanied by an experimental economic policy introduced by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in December 2012. “Abenomics” is a curious combination of currency devaluation, monetary policy, public spending, and neoliberal deregulation aimed at putting the Japanese economy back on a path toward economic growth. Kibo no kuni no ekusodasu (Exodus in a country of hope), Murakami’s near-future novel ([2000] 2002), served as a starting point for this debate, and its plot is worth recounting here (see also Miyazaki 2010). Murakami’s message about the loss of hope resonated powerfully with a widely shared sense of a blocked future at that time. In the novel, Murakami pointed to the fact that Japan had achieved an unprecedented level of affluence by the late 1980s and yet had lost a sense of the future during the 1990s, the decade that Murakami has been widely credited for naming the “lost decade” (ushi-

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nawareta junen). The novel is set in Japan in what was then the near-future period of 2003 to 2008. It reflected Murakami’s acute sense of the growing impact of the global force of money and finance on Japanese society (see, e.g., Miyazaki 2013). In fact, Murakami’s story grew out of his collaboration with financial market professionals and is peppered with references to financial techniques and market phenomena. The favorable reception of the novel in the early 2000s also represented a widely shared ambivalence toward the Japanese government’s programs of neoliberal “painful reform” (itami wo tomonau kaikaku) aimed at heroically breaking open the collective sense of blockage. In the novel Murakami had his protagonist reject such collective hope. The novel’s protagonist is a middle school student, Ponchan. Ponchan leads a large group of students to initiate a revolt. They make use of financial tools and techniques to destroy the Japanese economy by setting up an Internet-based market information distributor and manipulating market information in order to prompt global speculative capital to short-sell Japanese yen and cause a currency crisis. In the novel, Ponchan’s widely quoted remark, “There is every thing in this country. Indeed, there are so many different things here. But the only thing that is not here is hope” (Murakami [2000] 2002: 314; all quotations from this source are my own translation), is made in the midst of a currency crisis in which the value of the yen plunges. Murakami’s middle school students ultimately initiate a mass exodus to a town in Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, where they create an economic system based on its own alternative regional currency (360–362), a subject of intense interest at the time of the novel’s publication (see, e.g., Karatani 2000). It is important to recall that hope emerged as a key analytical concept in social theory precisely in this global context of intensifying neoliberal reform following the fall of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes (see, e.g., Harvey 2000; Zournazi 2003; see also Miyazaki 2004: 1–2; Miyazaki 2006). For example, in his widely acclaimed 2003 book, Australian anthropologist and cultural theorist Ghassan Hage theorized the “shrinking” of society’s ability to distribute hope equally. In particular, Hage drew attention to the linkage between the loss of hope among a certain segment of Australian society and narrow visions of nationalism in Australia: “Increasingly, their attachment to such a non-feeding nation generates a specific paranoid form of nationalism. . . . Paranoid nationalists are the no-hopers produced by transcendental capitalism and the politics of neo-liberal government” (21). Likewise, in his influential book Kibo kakusa shakai (The

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stratified hope society), Japanese sociologist Masahiro Yamada suggested that hope had ceased to be evenly distributed in society. According to Yamada, the neoliberal emphasis on “strong individuals” was producing “winners” (kachigumi) and “losers” (makegumi), and the latter simply gave up the possibility of imagining and hoping for a better future (2004). In Yamada’s interpretation, freeters, who refuse permanent employment; hikikomori, who refuse social interaction; NEETs (“not in education, employment, or training”), who show no interest in working or studying; and other social phenomena associated with Japanese youth were all manifestations of this trend. Unlike these proposals to use hope as an analytic for studying the changing relationship between economy and society under neoliberalism, Murakami maintained a deeply ambivalent posture toward what he saw as the loss of hope in Japanese society. Although he did not specify what he meant by hope, Murakami seems to have meant the kind of collective hope that had propelled postwar Japa nese economic growth by linking individual hopes for upward mobility and prosperity to the broader collective national goal of economic development. Murakami’s ambivalence toward such collective hope is made clear in Ponchan’s remark, immediately following the passage quoted above, about the absence of hope in Japanese society: “I just said that the only thing that is missing in this country is hope. However, we are not entirely sure whether hope is absolutely necessary for humans. As long as we are subject to this country’s system, that is not a question we are able to investigate. We have determined that it is not possible for us to ask whether hope is an indispensable thing for humans inside a country where the only sure thing is the lack of hope” (Murakami [2000] 2002: 319). Here, Murakami refutes the idea of hope as a moral imperative, and the novel ends with the following comment by Sekiguchi, a journalist following Ponchan’s activities and the narrator in the novel: “I have not been able to reach a final conclusion [about whether there is hope in Ponchan’s community and whether he should join Ponchan in that community]” (424; see Miyazaki 2010 for a more detailed analysis of Murakami’s work). At the time of the publication of this novel, Murakami often rejected any easy effort to reclaim hope for Japan’s future. Instead, he sought to dwell on the condition of no hope, and in his view, the strength required to dwell on that space would lead to a different kind of hope (Miyazaki 2010). Murakami’s ambivalence toward hope was in part a reaction to Japan’s new economic and political situation, in which ideas associated with the

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popular appeal of neoliberalism, such as “risk” and the “strong individual,” offered “a short-circuited and dangerous cultural expectation that these new economic concepts will generate new values and in turn will break through the blockage we are currently experiencing” (Murakami 1999: 8–9; my translation). In place of what in his view was paradoxical collective hope built on highly individualistic neoliberal ideas, Murakami called for knowledge. For him, knowledge offered a way forward after the collapse of social hope, particularly the kind of collective hope that, at least on the surface, had oriented the entire nation toward a single direction of economic growth to the point of unprecedented affluence. Instead of embracing neoliberalism as yet another source of collective hope for the nation, Murakami urged Japanese people to develop their own respective individual strengths anchored in knowledge. In his resolutely individualistic response to the collective enactment of neoliberal individualism in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, he emphasized knowledge over hope (see Miyazaki 2010: 242–45). Murakami’s oscillation between hope and knowledge may be productively juxtaposed with the contrast between the debates about hope and the knowledge economy, in both of which Japan has figured prominently. Japanese society has long been known for its commitment to learning, and the rapid growth of the postwar Japanese economy was routinely attributed to such collective commitment to learning and knowledge (Vogel 1979; see also Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995). To the extent that Japan has sometimes served as a model of our collective human future, the shift from knowledge to hope in the debate about the Japanese economy, signaled by Murakami’s embrace of hope after the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, perhaps also signals an emergent global trend.3 It is important to recall, however, that the very idea of knowledge in the knowledge economy and other similar concepts emerged in response to an analogous sense of loss of direction, the limits of rationality, and the ultimate importance of embracing ambiguity and uncertainty.4 Peter Drucker famously declared in his 1968 book, The Age of Discontinuity, that “from an economy of goods, which America was as recently as World War II, we have changed into a knowledge economy. . . . Knowledge has become the central ‘ factor of production’ in an advanced, developed economy” (263, 264). It is interesting to note that Drucker explicitly differentiates knowledge from science here: “ ‘Knowledge’ rather than ‘science’ has become the foundation of the modern economy” (265). For him, knowledge is a particular “form of energy”: “Knowledge, like electricity or money, is a form of energy that exists

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only when doing work. When the intellectual says knowledge he usually thinks of something new. But what matters in the ‘knowledge economy’ is whether knowledge, old or new, is applicable, e.g., Newtonian physics to the space program. What is relevant is the imagination and skill of whoever applies it, rather than the sophistication or newness of the information” (269; see also Drucker 1988). For Drucker, then, the pragmatic and imaginative engagement of knowledge with concrete tasks and goals makes knowledge a “form of energy” that fuels and moves forward the world. In this context knowledge perhaps can be called hope. Likewise, in his book Knowing Capitalism, human geographer Nigel Th rift has observed that “capitalism has become knowledgeable” (2005: 21). Th rift draws attention to the primacy of nonessentialist and nonfoundationalist forms of knowledge, including New Ageism, in what he terms “soft capitalism” (24). Here Thrift notes that academic knowledge and business are intermingled with one another, and “academics and business have come to think more alike about thinking” (21). More importantly, Th rift argues that this attention to knowledge is linked to a willingness to embrace uncertainty (24–29). Between the pragmatic orientation to knowledge that Drucker identifies in his vision of the knowledge economy and the embrace of uncertainty that Thrift identifies in his diagnosis of soft capitalism, The Economy of Hope finds a distinctive space for the intersection of hope and knowledge in the economy. Hope suggests a willingness to embrace uncertainty and also serves as a concrete method for keeping knowledge moving in conditions of uncertainty. The relationship between hope and knowledge has long been a profound philosophical preoccupation. In philosophical terms, hope often surfaces at the limits of knowledge. There have been many different articulations of the question of the basis of hope. How can one sustain one’s hope for a future that cannot possibly be known? Perhaps the most prominent modern response to this question can be found in Bloch’s attention to the category of “not yet” as the driving force of hope. Bloch sought to use the category of not yet to reorient philosophical knowledge to the future ([1959] 1986). Likewise, American pragmatist and postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty proposed to substitute hope for knowledge in his 1999 book, Philosophy and Social Hope. His thesis represents a reformulation of the long-standing antifoundationalist critique of metaphysics. He advocates a nonessentialist embrace of uncertainty as a declaration of human potentiality. Hope signals for him

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that “humanity is an open-ended notion” (1999: 52). More recently, Jonathan Lear has proposed the idea of “radical hope,” that is, a hope that is “directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is” (2006: 103). Courage at the limits of knowledge is implicit in his notion of radical hope as well.5 If these conceptualizations of hope contain within themselves a certain dose of heroism and radicalism in the face of uncertainty, indeterminacy, and the limits of human knowledge, in Hope in a Democratic Age, in contrast, Alan Mittleman approaches hope as a virtue and calls for “moderation in hope” (2009: 257). In his view, Hope is best understood as a virtue, indeed as a civic virtue—a virtue that conduces to our life in common—and that virtue discloses knowledge. In searching for the warrant of hope, I would claim that the act of hope itself gives us an intuition or fundamental apprehension of its ground. . . . Hope knows and affirms the value that inheres in being as such. It anticipates the full amplitude of value against a temporal horizon, a near or far future. Hope is felt as knowledge, that is, as an affirmation of something other than will, than mere desire or wishfulness. That knowledge, in which hope senses it participates, is the knowledge of value. . . . The ontology of hope is one where being and value are joined. (ibid.: 6; original emphasis) For Mittleman, hope as a virtue knows its own rationality. In this formulation, hope becomes knowledge of its own. A “moderate” conception of hope for Mittleman resolves the tension between hope and knowledge (ibid.: 258–70). In my 2004 book, The Method of Hope, I suggested that hope be approached as a method of knowledge rather than as another subject of ethnographic investigation. In that book, I drew on Bloch’s, Rorty’s, and others’ efforts to reorient philosophy to the future through the lens of hope to theorize reorientation itself as a key operation of hope. I drew par ticu lar attention to these phi losophers’ shared attention to the retrospective orientation of metaphysics. An awareness of the temporal directionality of knowledge, I argued, allows its redirection (see Miyazaki 2004: 12–16). Reflexivity facilitates reorientation. The economy of hope likewise revolves around an economy of knowledge, that is, the movement from knowledge to its limits and back to knowledge. Here hope inheres in knowledge’s incessant movement and all

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the work that ensures its own reorientation to the future unknown. Hope becomes knowledge in a specific sense. Hope is a paradoxical step in the process of knowing through an embrace of the limits of knowledge. The economy of hope calls for such continuous performative and interactive work of active commitment to knowing while recognizing the ultimate human incapacity to know. Hope appears at the limits of knowledge in this double sense. Hope is knowledge of itself, but hope becomes knowledge through the oscillation and movement between the two. Indeed, it is the relationship between hope and knowledge (including the question of what it means to know hope) that animates the economy of hope. In this context, the oscillation between hope and knowledge in Murakami’s thought is precisely an instantiation of the economy of hope. The idea of reorientation is inherent in the question of how hope may be regained. When Murakami turned against hope as he offered a diagnosis of Japan’s loss of hope, in my view, he implicitly reoriented the urge to restore hope. In the midst of the loss of faith in knowledge (particularly the loss of confidence in expert knowledge) following the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster, Murakami turns to hope. Hope is in these moments of reorientation. The Economy of Hope collectively seeks to perform a reorientation of this particular kind. It does not simply argue for a shift from knowledge to hope as a framework for the study of economy and society. Instead, it brings into view such reorientation itself and the empirical, methodological, and theoretical implications of such reorientation. Each chapter either explicitly or implicitly captures specific economic actors’ senses of personal reorientation that the reorientation from knowledge to hope brings into view. In the volume, this reorientation sequentially manifests itself as a movement away from utopian (ideologically championed but mostly unrealistic and unrealized) hope (see the chapters by Swedberg, Verdery, and Genda); as a movement toward more realistic hopes (see the chapters by Verdery and Genda); as a movement into interstitial spaces of hope, such as petitions (see the chapter by Verdery); playful and potentially wasteful efforts (see the chapter by Genda); legal fictions functioning as placeholders (see the chapter by Riles); economic niches (see the chapter by Guyer); the rhetorical space between form and substance (see Chapter 7 by Miyazaki); and finally as a replication of such movement itself (see, especially, the chapters by Riles, Guyer, and Miyazaki, but also the entire volume). In the final section of this chapter, also, I juxtapose Murakami’s near-future novel with that of another high-profi le Japanese novelist, Yoko Tawada (2014). In this juxtaposition,

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I contrast Murakami’s heroic stance to Tawada’s more playful and darker stance. This reorientation of my own is aimed at recapturing the interplay of openness and closure in the economy of hope that manifests itself in moments of reorientation and movements of replication.

Hope and Reality In his review of classical and contemporary sociological treatments of the subject of hope, Richard Swedberg draws attention to two ways in which hope may become a subject of social scientific interest. First, he suggests that hope cannot be discussed without reference to its objects (cf. Miyazaki 2004: 5), and in his view those objects are inherently social, political, and economic. Second, and more importantly for present purposes, Swedberg points to the complex relationship between hope and reality. On the one hand, hope can be conceived as effective only if it is realistic and achievable. On the other hand, hope can be conceived as irrelevant to reality (Swedberg, Chapter 1, this volume). In other words, hope lies between what is real and what is not (see also Adelson 2014). As Swedberg notes, Albert O. Hirschman’s attention to the role of “intended but unrealized effects” in the economy is particularly significant in this context. Whereas social scientists routinely focus on the unintended consequences of social action, Hirschman notes, “the expectation of large, if unrealistic, benefits obviously serves to facilitate certain social decisions” ([1977] 1997: 131). Here Hirschman draws attention not only to the role of dreams and utopian goals in social change but also to the methodological difficulty in recovering these “intended but unrealized effects” retrospectively. Both Swedberg’s chapter on eighteenth-century Swedish “mercantilist utopian projects” and Katherine Verdery’s chapter on utopian agrarian reform programs in communist Romania dramatize this methodical problem, albeit in contrasting ways. The focus of Swedberg’s analysis is on the utopian optimism that pervaded eighteenth-century Swedish society. He examines the Swedish state’s and Swedish elite’s endeavors to manage the country’s resources and wealth after the model of the household economy. These mercantilist projects focused on producing goods to substitute for imported goods with a view to increasing the self-sufficiency of the Swedish economy. In these endeavors, Swedberg notes, Swedish bureaucrats and intellectuals were driven by their

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“hopeful” estimation that Sweden had an abundance of natural resources. According to Swedberg, this optimism was anchored in Swedes’ firm religious conviction that their country was “blessed by the Lord” (Swedberg, Chapter 2, this volume). Swedberg first describes the Swedish state’s efforts to create an inventory of every resource found in Sweden. Central to this endeavor was a branch of economic knowledge called political arithmetic. As Swedberg notes, political arithmetic had a peculiarly “normative” orientation: “It was interested not only in what the wealth of a country amounted to, but also in establishing how much it could amount to” (Chapter 2, this volume; original emphasis). What drove the endeavor was “the hope that Sweden was a rich and wealthy country.” Here a commitment to accurate counting coincided with a highly speculative and optimistic estimation. As Swedberg notes, the project’s commitment to accurate counting itself, particularly its determination to “reduc[e] every thing to a number,” was utopian to begin with (Chapter 2, this volume). A bureaucratic Office of Tables was devoted to this utopian effort to collect population and other resource-related data. Ironically, however, it soon discovered that Sweden’s resources were not as rich as had been expected. There were fewer people, and fewer natu ral resources, than previously thought. The numbers “helped to puncture . . . the dream that Sweden was a wealthy country” (Swedberg, Chapter 2, this volume). In an ironic tone, however, Swedberg points to the fact that, as a result of this political arithmetic, Sweden developed a mechanism for collecting highly reliable statistical information. Swedberg also examines yet another ironic consequence of the eighteenth-century Swedish mercantilist utopian project. The Swedish state launched an effort to create “manufactories,” various types of industry to produce goods to substitute for imported goods. Among many goods identified for such production was the potato as a substitute for imported grain. Farmers initially resisted growing potatoes, but they were persuaded to do so when the Board of Commerce pointed to the potential use of potatoes for liquor production. This eventually resulted in the centrality of potatoes in the nation’s diet. In Swedberg’s view, nearly all of Sweden’s mercantilist utopian projects failed to achieve their intended goals. Manufactories remained too small to produce enough goods to replace imported goods for domestic consumption, and most importantly, goods produced by manufactories were not of high

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enough quality to be marketable either domestically or internationally. As a result, Swedberg argues, manufactories did not serve as precursors to factorybased capitalist industrial production. However, Swedberg gravitates toward hopeful irony. Sweden never became a capitalist giant, but its meticulous population statistics and potatoes, two solid foundations of modern Swedish life, are ironic products of this “unpredictable chain[] of events” (Swedberg, Chapter  2, this volume) originating from eighteenth-century Sweden’s highly optimistic and ultimately failed utopian national projects. Swedberg emphasizes the unpredictable quality of utopian hope in the economy and lets his own sense of irony surface as a substitute for that hope. In other words, here, unpredictability serves as a space for hope. If Swedberg’s analysis foregrounds the analyst’s ironic vision of the relationship between hope and reality, anthropologist Katherine Verdery’s analysis of Romania’s farm collectivization presents the analyst’s own disappointment as an entry point for her effort to recover hope in the seemingly hopeless reality created by the communist utopian experiment. Verdery’s chapter examines the fate of the competing hopes of local cadres of the Romanian Communist Party and various wealthy and not so wealthy peasants in the context of the communist state’s collective utopian effort to disassociate its economy from the market and ultimately “subordinate [the economy] to” politics. Verdery suggests that in Romania the communist utopian hope of creating “a better and more meaningful life” for all quickly disappeared because of both the resistance from peasants and the violent and coercive means used to force collectivization. Whereas Swedberg locates hope in the unintended and ironic consequences of utopian projects, Verdery focuses on other kinds of hope that emerged from the reality in which utopian projects proved simultaneously vacuous and violent. In Verdery’s view, students of socialism like herself once shared this communist utopian hope and were disappointed by the brutal real ity of communist societies in which they found themselves. Verdery frames this disappointment methodologically: “To elucidate its real-world shortcomings was therefore more than merely an analytical task: it represented the disappointment of the analysts’ hopes for more attractive life prospects—a disappointment that might obstruct their search for hope as an ethnographic object, in their material” (Verdery, this volume). Verdery also finds her interlocutors reluctant to explicitly discuss the hope that they might have placed on communism in the past. She instead searches for evidence of the collision between Communist Party–orchestrated

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utopian hope and peasants’ more mundane hopes for survival. In this tension between collective and individual hopes, Verdery draws attention to spaces of quotidian creativity and inventiveness. Verdery describes hopes of three different groups of actors under Romania’s socialist experiments: local cadres, peasants with few resources, and relatively wealthier peasants known as chiaburi. According to Verdery, local cadres were not able to reconcile their utopian hope with peasants’ hopes. Peasants refused and were eventually forced to give up their land. For wealthier farmers and landowners, this meant loss of their previous hopes anchored in their land and family wealth, whereas it meant a hope for less privileged farmers: “Here was hope turned upside down” (Verdery, this volume). As a result, local cadres needed to resort to coercion. This in turn allowed the utopian end of communism to be undermined by the violent means by which local cadres pursued it. Verdery seeks to locate hope in unlikely places. For example, she analyzes petitions written by wealthier farmers, and here she finds their “inventiveness” (Verdery, this volume). She notes that in their petitions, they sought to appear less wealthy than they actually were so that they might not be classified as chiaburi. Verdery sees hope in these peasants’ efforts to exercise their agency to persuade local cadres to see them as having less agency. Similarly, other peasants sought to manipulate conditions inserted in their petitions to join a collective. In these efforts to manipulate the Communist Party’s official form and language, Verdery detects yet another example of peasants’ exercising their agency. Likewise, she points to the widespread hope for Americans to liberate Romania. Here again, just like wealthy peasants, Romanian peasants seem to have denied some aspects of their agency in order to regain other aspects of it. Verdery’s analysis suggests that the redefi nition and manipulation of agency is an integral part of the production of hope. Such reformulation creates a way to redefine, rearrange, and reorient the relationship with one’s interlocutors. The refashioning of relationality is impor tant to the production of hope precisely because it opens up, once again, what is seemingly closed and overdetermined (see Miyazaki 2004). These themes surrounding the question of agency recur throughout the volume. Whereas Verdery struggles to find hope in the ruins of communist utopian projects in her chapter for this volume, it is interesting to note that in an earlier work (1995) she drew attention to the emergence of an explicit discourse of hope in the years following the collapse of the socialist regime

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in Romania. According to Verdery, hope, an idea previously contained within family life, surfaced as part of the public conversation about Romania’s transition from socialism to capitalism, particularly in the context of the emergence of a pyramid scheme known as Caritas. In Verdery’s analysis, hope surfaced as part of the mystification of the work of money: “The process of learning forms of economic or market rationality—a process to which Caritas was central—has been occurring in part through the irrational means of faith and hope, God and the devil. This suggests that Caritas was teaching people not market rationality but its mystification” (1995: 656). Unlike the competing mundane hopes for survival that she has managed to uncover in her study in the present volume, in her earlier work Verdery saw a process of mystification in actors’ explicit invocation of hope. If she detects hope in a reality evacuated by utopian (and unrealistic) hope in her chapter for this volume, in her earlier work she detected the masking of the real in the discourse of hope. The contrast between Verdery’s two works points to the particular efficacy of the framework of hope put forward by this volume. In her earlier work on the discourse of hope, Verdery placed her analytical hope in an effort to debunk the mystifying power of money as it manifested itself in the discourse of hope. In contrast, the framework for this volume (and its insistence on the social scientist’s own hope as an analytical resource) has allowed Verdery to offer a different analytical hope and possibility, that is, the possibility of finding hope between the real and the unreal and in the interstitial spaces of human creativity and inventiveness that may or may not become real. The dynamics of hope and real ity in communist and postcommunist Romania can be productively contrasted with the dynamics of hope and reality in postwar Japan, as examined in the chapter by Japanese economist Yuji Genda. In his chapter, Genda, one of the key figures in the Japanese debate about hope, investigates the fate of individual Japanese actors’ hopes in the Japanese government-sponsored effort to realign Japanese society to the market during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Like the Romanian cases that Verdery analyzes, Japan’s neoliberal reform also had a utopian dimension. It entailed a utopian hope for a more efficient economy and society. Whereas in Romania’s transition to capitalism hope emerged explicitly as a category, in Japan the loss of hope became a dominant sentiment in neoliberal reform. In both of these collective projects of socioeconomic reform, individual and collective hopes collided with divergent consequences.

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As already mentioned, the Japanese debate has reflected a pervasive sense of malaise or blockage over more than a decade of Japanese economic recession. In particular, the debate has revolved around phenomena widely attributed to increasingly inward-looking youth, such as freeters, hikikomori, and NEETs (see, e.g., Brinton 2011; Genda [2001] 2005; Genda and Maganuma 2005; Yamada 2004). These phenomena have amplified the sense of threat to the nation’s productive and reproductive capacity, already occasioned by an aging population, a steady decline in the country’s birth rate, a widely perceived decline in the quality of education, and a prolonged economic slump (see also Allison 2014). All these phenomena were also cast in popular debates in terms of a tension between the ideal and the real. Unproductive youth were regarded as idealists with unrealistic dreams. Genda’s work has focused sharply on challenging these formulations of the problem. Genda’s 2001 award-winning book, Shigoto no naka no aimaina fuan (translated into English as A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity in 2005), attributes the loss of hope among Japanese young people to a structural problem in Japan’s labor markets and employment practices in which opportunities for youth are sacrificed to protect older employees (Genda [2001] 2005: 44–49). In his view, people categorized as freeters and NEETs are not “losers” as others have suggested (see, e.g., Yamada 2004). Rather, they are people who have never been given opportunities to learn to navigate changing labor markets and employment practices (Genda [2001] 2005; Genda and Maganuma 2005). Between 2005 and 2009, Genda led a large-scale, multiyear, interdisciplinary research project on the state of hope in Japan through the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science (University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Genda, and Uno 2009a, 2009b). Genda and his colleagues conducted surveys on hope, as well as related field research in Kamaishi, a long-declining northern Japanese city once known for its steel industry and most recently ravaged by the tsunami of March 11, 2011 (see University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Genda, and Uno 2009a, 2009b; University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Nakamura, and Genda 2014); and Fukui Prefecture, where a number of nuclear power plants are located (see University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science and Genda 2013). Some of the results of this project are detailed in Genda’s contribution to this volume. It is significant that the survey conducted by Genda’s team does not necessarily offer conclusive evidence of the loss of hope in Japan, but Genda draws attention to various factors leading to the shrinking of opportunities and possibilities for Japanese youth.

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What is interesting about Genda’s approach to the subject of hope is his distinction between “attainable” and “unattainable” hopes. Th is reflects the operational defi nition of hope that Genda’s team has adapted from Swedberg—“a wish for something to come true by action” (see Swedberg, Chapter 1, this volume). They tack on the phrase “by action,” a move to focus on hope’s attainability and to distinguish hope from unrealistic daydreams and utopian imaginations. This focus on the attainability of hope becomes particularly significant in the context of Genda’s analysis of unattained hopes. Genda finds in his survey that those who have been able to change or adjust their original hopes are more motivated to work. Genda also notes that the experience of a setback and recovery from it is generative of a hopeful outlook. Attainable hope seems to result from the way individuals handle failures. Here Genda points to the importance of storytelling. According to him, individuals capable of reflecting on and describing their own setbacks also know how to represent hopefulness in their own stories. Genda’s attention to storytelling as opposed to more structural factors is related to his understanding of the role of ambiguity in the production of hope (Genda, this volume; see also Genda 2010). He pays particular attention to the role that loosely defined relationships, or “weak ties,” such as friendship—as opposed to kinship, contractual relations, and other more tightly defined relationships—play in cultivating hope (Genda 2006, 2010). Here hope is defined as a relational phenomenon in a particular sense. All this suggests that Genda seeks to find a space between two rigid, extreme positions—the collectivism for which Japan has long been known and the individualism that the country’s neoliberal reform programs have promoted. Genda’s insistence on the roles of flexibility, ambiguity, and playfulness in the production of hope is related to his skepticism about the “solution-oriented” approach emphasized by neoliberal thinking (Genda, this volume; see also Genda 2010). Under neoliberal reform programs, Genda observes, “only uniform assertions and concerns have been put forward on the desirable direction of society, and people’s flexibility and tolerance toward ambivalent ideas have weakened” (Genda, this volume). Instead, he emphasizes the importance of having space, a wasteful space, a space for play. Such space is inherently ambiguous. It could be useful or completely wasteful. It is impossible for that space to be evaluated for its productivity in advance. Genda concludes that the loss of space for ambiguity has had much to do with the increasing sense of the loss of hope in Japan. For him, ultimately,

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however, hope is not a necessary condition for society: “Society exists even in the absence of such stories [of hope]. In this sense, a story of hope only belongs to areas such as ‘play’ and ‘space’ in society. However, a social situation in which tolerance for play and space is lost may be the basis for the loss of hope” (Genda, this volume). Both Verdery and Genda struggle to find hope against utopian hopes—communist and neoliberal hopes, respectively. Both find hope in interstitial spaces of inventiveness, creativity, and playfulness. What Genda suggests by the language of play is closely related to what legal scholar and anthropologist Annelise Riles seeks to demonstrate through her examination of the device of legal fictions. Like Genda, Riles describes a space of creativity in legal knowledge. Importantly, however, what occupies Riles is not the loss of hope. Rather, she is interested in the lack of such sense of loss in legal knowledge. Riles’s chapter focuses on the power of fictional categories in the practice of economic law. Legal fictions are subjunctive categories widely used in law, such as the fiction of the corporation as a person: “A legal fiction is a factual statement a judge, a legal scholar, or a lawyer tells while simultaneously understanding full well—and also understanding that the audience understands—that the statement is not fact” (Riles, this volume; original emphasis). These fictions are deployed because they are useful. Drawing on Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophy of “As If,” Riles notes Vaihinger’s attention to the “tension between what is true and not true” and more importantly, his insistence that fictions are a means to an end and a tool (Vaihinger [1924] 2000). Here Riles seeks to bring into view the “hopeful quality of instrumentalism.” To the extent that the goal of economic law is to create an international economic order, she seeks to bring to light the “technical source of law’s agentive power” (Riles, this volume). Riles focuses on the way legal fictions reorient legal knowledge. In particular, Riles carefully examines the reorientation of legal knowledge accomplished by American legal scholar Morris Cohen in his 1923 article, “On the Logic of Fiction.” The analysis of Cohen’s article that Riles offers is abstract, technical, and complex, but it is worth recounting here. Cohen critiques Vaihinger’s assumption that fictions are inherently contrasted with reality. In Cohen’s view, fictions are “analytical relations,” and they “exist in the world” (Riles, this volume). In Cohen’s reasoning, Riles sees a fundamental reversal of the direction of legal knowledge: “Cohen has a feel for the directionality of the centuries-long debate about legal fictions in the law: He is aware . . . that the question of the epistemological status of the legal fiction . . . turns on

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another question, the question of political agency in law—is the answer to a legal question found, or made?” (Riles, this volume). As a realist legal scholar, Cohen would have normally insisted that “the law was not simply a system of discovered logic but an artifact of judging” (ibid.) and hence that what was at stake was the question of politics. In this view, legal fictions ought to be understood as nothing but artifacts of judicial power. However, Riles observes that Cohen reorients this line of argument in his 1923 article. Cohen critiques Vaihinger’s “positivistic distinction between reality and fiction” (ibid.), but Cohen also complicates the contrast between “what is found” and “what is made”: “We always speak of finding the solution to all sorts of problems and even great mechanical inventors testify that they find their inventions, that the sought-for-device sometimes ‘flashes upon them,’ and most often they ‘stumble upon it’ while looking for something else” (Cohen 1923: 484–85; quoted in Riles, this volume). In Riles’s view, here Cohen invokes nonhuman agency in human creativity. In other words, Riles observes, Cohen draws attention to a moment in which “ legal knowledge runs away from the knower, and becomes more than a tool in human hands” (Riles, this volume). In Riles’s view, this observation is surprising given Cohen’s strong realist commitment to understanding law as a resolutely political field. Yet, Riles’s point is that this insight arises from a simple reversal of the direction of conventional legal argument. When Cohen reverses the direction of argument about legal fictions from the idea of legal fictions as fictions (as opposed to reality) to the idea of legal fictions as analytical relations found in the world, he also begins to see the complex relationship between what is found and what is made. The role of human agency in this relationship suddenly becomes ambiguous. Riles further suggests that this reversal is a “routinized aspect” of legal knowledge. Here she points to what she calls the double “as if ” of legal fictions: “A legal fiction is a legal conclusion—an act of judgment—that takes the form of a factual statement: it is a theory presented as if it were a fact” (Riles, this volume; original emphasis). That is, the “ ‘as if ’ of fact (the subjunctive assertion of a factual claim that is known to be false . . .) turns on the ‘as if ’ relationship of judgment to fact itself—the legal conclusion that takes the form of a fact” (original emphasis). Riles calls this the “agentive power of the legal fiction”: “The power of the device inheres in the way it . . . redirects attention from the question of ‘Who shall decide, and how shall she decide?’ to a question of ‘Is the legal statement true or false?” (emphasis added). In Riles’s

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analysis, the legal fiction is a “technique of reorientation” (this volume), and in her view, Cohen’s reorientation replicated this aspect of legal fictions. Swedberg, Verdery, Genda, and Riles find hope—albeit differently defined in terms of irony, inventiveness, playfulness, and fictionality—in the interstices between what is real and what is not. More precisely, the five chapters separately and together reorient hope, from the question of what is realistic versus what is not, to the space in between in which hope is found again and again. In this context, it is not perhaps accidental that this introductory chapter opens with a novel that engages with the real world and will close with another. In the next section, I turn to this repetitive and replicative dimension of hope.

Hope and Repetition The implicit or explicit reorientation observed in each chapter in turn enables a distinctive kind of reflexivity and recursivity in each. Analytical attention to reorientation at actors’ reflexive moments in turn facilitates metalevel reorientation on the part of social scientists. In other words, hope as a subject of analysis induces its own methodological replication in an analysis of it. In this sense, over the course of this volume, hope emerges as more than a simple object of analysis. Each chapter of this volume demonstrates this replicative tendency of hope in its own specific context. When Swedberg locates the subject of hope between the real and the utopian, he suggests that the subject of hope demands methodological innovations for empirical social scientific research (Swedberg, Chapter 1, this volume). In other words, as he seeks to fi nd a way to present hope as a subject of interest to sociologists, Swedberg also poses a  methodological challenge to sociological knowledge. There is a gesture toward methodological reorientation here. Verdery’s case brings her own personal and professional hope and actors’ hopes into the same plane of reflection. Verdery juxtaposes her own and her socialist studies colleagues’ disappointment with communist experiments. The tension between utopian ideals and harsh realities in turn serves as a different kind of opening for her where she detects traces of hope in actors’ practical creativity and ingenuity. Here she displaces her and her colleagues’ disappointment with less utopian and yet profoundly human hopes for survival on the part of actors. In contradistinction to her earlier

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critical engagement with the money-driven capitalist discourse of hope following the collapse of the communist regime in Romania, this volume’s analytical framework prompts Verdery to rediscover hope retrospectively in unlikely spaces in Romania’s seemingly hopeless socialist realities. Genda draws attention to a significant change in the discipline of economics. According to him, economists used to take “hope” for granted. In his view, they used to routinely assume perpetual economic growth and the associated general idea that tomorrow is better than today. As one of the most influential Japanese economists and public intellectuals of his generation, Genda is well known for his work on job creation (Genda 2004) and employment issues surrounding Japanese youth. At the time of its publication, his book Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity captured young Japanese readers’ attention and dramatized the changing employment outlook for Japanese youth in Japan’s shrinking economy (Genda [2001] 2005). Genda’s indictment of older generations’ efforts to protect their vested interests at the expense of opportunities for younger generations resonated powerfully with a pervasive sense of insecurity and hopelessness among Japanese youth during the first decade of this century. In 2005, Genda turned to the subject of hope, a very unusual subject for social scientific research in Japan. In his chapter for this volume, Genda stresses the importance of story, play, and wasted effort. Here he anchors his thinking about hope in both conventional survey-data-based empirical research fi ndings and self-consciously nonconventional casual and anecdotal observations. Genda’s goal is to capture a fuzzy zone between reality and imagination in which hope resides, but his turn to unconventional methodologies is significant in its own right in the context of his assessment of the changed world in which economists can no longer take hope for granted. In this context, for Genda, hope needs to become an explicit subject and in turn calls for a methodological reorientation of socioeconomic research. This recursive and reflexive tendency of hope is evident in the broader scholarly debate about hope. One of the intellectual causes for the resurfacing of the subject of hope in social theory over the last two decades has been social theorists’ sense of the intensifying force of the market not only in society at large but also in their own academic institutions. The emergence of hope in social theory is partly driven by a metatheoretical problem of the loss of critical hope arising from the apparent loss of alternatives to global capitalism and neoliberalism (see, e.g., Harvey 2000; Zournazi 2003). In this context, social theorists’ own hope has been clearly at the forefront of their

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writings on hope. For example, in his 2000 book, Spaces of Hope, David Harvey sought to rekindle what he calls “an optimism of the intellect” on the seemingly hopeless horizon for progressive politics following the so-called collapse of the Soviet Union and other socialist regimes (Harvey 2000). In this context, hope as a subject of inquiry cannot, and should not, be separated from the hope that underlies such inquiry. In other words, the hope entailed in social scientific analyses is social scientists’ analytical resource for an investigation of the character of hope. Riles’s chapter offers a contrasting case to this widely acknowledged resonance between the loss of hope in academic knowledge and that in the world. If disappointment, or the condition of the loss of hope, serves as a starting point for Verdery’s and Genda’s inquiries, the starting point of Riles’s inquiry is her observation that “law as a discipline has suffered no crisis on par with the crisis of social theory . . . , and legal actors face no momentous problem of how to go on that is on par with those faced by the social actors studied by [theorists of hope]” (this volume). Instead, Riles’s inquiry focuses on an effort to specify in what sense law can be seen as an inherently “hopeful discipline” and where law’s power originates. She finds law’s hopefulness in the instrumental quality of legal fictions itself. Like other chapters, however, central to Riles’s argument is the problem of replication. In her chapter, underlying the law’s hopefulness is the power of replication. Just as Cohen replicated a routinized aspect of legal knowledge, the legal fiction as a device is routinely replicated from one context to another. According to Riles, the inventors of legal fictions are not visible in the actual practice of law. What she calls the agentive power of law resides not in the inventors of legal fictions but in the acts in which legal fictions are replicated and redeployed. Riles takes the legal doctrine of the implied warranty of habitability—an implied guarantee that leased property be in habitable condition—as an example. Legal practitioners who deploy this doctrine would not think of the judges that invented the doctrine. In Riles’s view, the power of the legal fiction inheres in moments of its replication in which the  doctrine is discussed and deployed in law review articles, law school classrooms, and law offices: “Legal knowledge comes into agentive being in the process of its being handed from one legal actor to another, and in that process it comes to constitute the very actors that deploy it.” In this context, “the truth value of the legal fiction is not simply ambiguous or subjunctive; it is actually quite irrelevant” (Riles, this volume). In Riles’s view, law’s

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power (and hope) inheres in the power of such replication across different specific problems and cases. Riles’s attention to the replicative tendency of legal techniques builds on my earlier exposition of the replicative tendency of hope in indigenous Fijian knowledge, studied in detail in The Method of Hope (Miyazaki 2004). In that ethnography, I offered an account of various instances of reorientation in indigenous Fijian knowledge. A specific moment in indigenous Fijian ritual giving served as a guiding image for my argument. In every indigenous Fijian presentation of ceremonial gifts, gift givers and gift receivers position themselves across from each other before the spokesperson for gift givers begins to present their gifts. After a long speech that humbly and respectfully acknowledges the long-standing relationship between gift givers and receivers, there is a step in which the spokesperson for gift givers stops speaking and awaits the gift receivers’ reaction. I have argued that this is a moment of hope in which gift givers place their agency in abeyance, at least for that moment. What this means is that gift givers let gift receivers respond and complete the action initiated by the givers. The spokesperson for gift receivers in turn typically thanks the givers for their generosity, respectfulness, and humbleness before praying to God for his blessing and mercy (Christianity is the dominant religion among indigenous Fijians). Here the spokesperson for gift receivers declares that the only and true gift is love, that is, human relationality itself. I suggested that this replicates the earlier ritual moment of hope on another terrain, that is, the terrain of humans’ relationship with God. Indigenous Fijian gift giving therefore contains within itself a series of moments of reorientation, from the past to the future and from human relationships to humans’ relationship with God. The kind of openness at stake in the first moment is qualitatively different from that in the second moment, but that is precisely why it gives each replication a sense of what is to come. In The Method of Hope, I observed a similar interplay of openness and closure across different facets of indigenous Fijian social life, from Christian church services to land claims, entrepreneurship, and politics, in which actors repeatedly sought to reintroduce “prospective momentum to a present moment continually invaded by retrospection of all kinds, such as memory, nostalgia, a sense of achievement, or critique. Hope is the only method of recapturing hope” (128). It is in this context that I sought to recapture indigenous Fijian actors’ hope through its replication in my own analysis (see also Miyazaki 2014b).

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The last two chapters of this volume dramatize this process of hope’s replication and repetition in the intersections of economy and religion. Africanist anthropologist Jane Guyer’s chapter focuses on a pervasive optimistic and resilient outlook in Africa despite all the evidence suggesting a contrary view. Guyer searches for an ethnographic explanation for this general and regularly observed outlook. In her view, this sense of resilience ought not be understood as a cultural trait of Africans. She investigates the substantive presence of a “positive orientation to the near future” (this volume) in various acts of replication and repetition, and in a series of multiple examples, spaces, and moments, in West African economic and religious activities. What makes Guyer’s chapter particularly challenging and compelling is the way she connects the macro- and microdimensions of West African life as well as its short- and long-term horizons through its distinctively replicative logic. Here Guyer’s focus is sharply on the interplay of scale and temporality in Nigerian entrepreneurship and divination. Of Nigerian entrepreneurship she observes, “Products and occupations follow a ‘niche’ logic within regional and intercontinental markets” (this volume), and yet this niche logic generates a broader and longer view. For example, there are a large number of named economic activities: “A new product, a new skill, a new artisanal phase of production first of all has to be successfully named to differentiate it conceptually from the existing repertoire.” All named activities come with sets of organizational forms, protocols, practices, and modes of training, marketing, and collaboration. These numerous named activities, and the niches that they fi ll, in turn generate a sense of infinite possibility for replication and repetition: “The horizon is an endless vista.” Nigerian entrepreneurs move from one such space of invention and creativity to another, and each invention replicates and repeats something of what has come before: “There are always spaces, and people are tropic toward them. They combine the novel vision involved in moving into a space with the replicative imagination of knowing how to do so without, at the same time, prejudging any specific outcome.” In this context, “each transaction is both uniquely tailored to context and also a replication.” Guyer summarizes this process as follows: “Replication is the means through which newness is created. Routine should not be understood as a repetition of outcome but as a reprise of method. It is an unending reapplication of past realizations to present potentials for theoretically limitless permutation and combination” (ibid.). In their movement from one space to another, Nigerian entrepreneurs refashion themselves through replication and repetition, and each movement

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entails both prior and future moments of replication. An act of replication then encompasses both old and new elements and in turn projects to the future a further sense of endless possibility and even eternity. This is where Guyer returns to the prevalent discourse about West African resilience: “ ‘Resilience’ springs eternal, then, not because people aim for restitution or social reproduction, as a structuralist position would imply, but because spaces themselves are a primary and eternal component of both ontology and context. The realization of human potential involves moving into them” (ibid.). Guyer implies here that there is a certain faith in a space of replication itself. Without such faith it would not be possible for one to keep going, as one’s experience is not always overwhelmingly positive. Guyer juxtaposes Nigerian entrepreneurship to the practice of divination, in which “each event is both unique and referential or recursive” (original emphasis). Guyer observes that eternity manifests itself in these specific moments and spaces of replication and repetition: “In the Yoruba case, spaces opened up all the time, in all kinds of surprising places. Anticipation and resolution were writ very small as well as very large. The eternal was made up of thousands of internested temporalities, each of which contained the prospective momentum of replication of event, example, and experience” (this volume). In this context, hope is simultaneously about both the temporal and the eternal. Guyer’s attention to Alexander Pope’s phrase—“hope springs eternal”—is particularly powerful and pertinent here. Guyer explicates it as follows: “Hope endures as a kind of daily promise that there is, indeed, an eternity, and it lies more in the recurrence by which it ‘springs’ (with the verb in the present continuous tense) than in any confident comprehension of an ultimate horizon” (this volume). Here Guyer offers an image of hope’s gravitation toward eternity in its repetition, replication, and “springing” in the present. For her, replication or repetition serves as a linkage between actors’ everyday activities in time and what lies beyond those moments and even what lies beyond time. Guyer’s gesture toward eternity through replication and repetition is carried forward into the final chapter of this volume, my own chapter, inspired by Barack Obama’s campaign of hope during the 2008 presidential election. In that chapter, I juxtapose three different specific processes of replication— indigenous Fijian exchange, Japanese arbitrage trading, and Obama’s political campaign in the unfolding global financial crisis. The goal is to think about the replication and repetition of hope—here more specifically a kind of formulation of openness described as “not yet”—through the interplay of

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substance and belief in each of these processes. My focus is on Obama’s repeated efforts to redefine the substance of his hope during his first presidential campaign. I juxtapose his hope with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s reflection on hope in order to demonstrate the way Obama simultaneously builds on and redefines hope’s anchoring in faith (“belief,” in his words). In my reflection on Obama’s 2008 campaign of hope at a moment of pervasive disappointment with his presidency as his second term draws to a close, I draw attention to the economy of hope, here defined in terms of form and substance as well as changes in the scale of hope, at work at the heart of his 2008 campaign. My goal is to suggest how this economy of hope may continue to work in the present moment of U.S. politics. Hope’s horizon is simultaneously both open and closed. Whereas utopian hope and optimism often result in failure, failed hopes sometimes lead to unexpected openings, as in the case of Swedberg’s eighteenth-century Swedish utopian mercantilism or Genda’s insistence on the importance of wasted effort. The analytical discovery (or rediscovery) of hope in seemingly hopeless situations, such as Verdery’s rediscovery of peasants’ hopes during Romania’s socialist experiments, or Murakami’s rediscovery of hope after Japan’s triple disaster of March 2011, also indicates the way hope surfaces through the interplay of openness and closure. This interplay makes hope at times lacking and at times renewed. As Guyer suggests, the openness of hope implies a certain sense of closure or constraint (cf. Strathern 1988). Hope always contains within itself known forms replicated in not-yet-known terrains. Hope’s “resilience” comes from this combined process of replication and reorientation.

Another Reorientation Given hope’s locus in the space between reality and fiction and that between repetition and difference, I now return to the economy of hope in another Japanese near-future novel. Kentoshi (literally meaning “missions to dedicate light,” which were Japa nese tributary missions to the Tang Dynasty sent periodically from the seventh to ninth century), a 2014 novel by Germanybased internationally acclaimed novelist Yoko Tawada, amplifies the dissonance of post-Fukushima Japan by offering a simulta neously playful and dark vision of hope. If Murakami saw, or hoped to see, an opening for renewed hope in the midst of Japan’s unfolding disaster in March 2011, the

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triple disaster set the stage for a peculiar politics of openness and closure. Contrary to Murakami’s and many other Japanese intellectuals’ expectations that the disaster would catalyze radical change in Japanese society, what has unfolded since the disaster instead is a layering of dissonances of all kinds— dissonances between victims of the tsunami and the nuclear disaster in Fukushima and elsewhere and the rest of the nation, between the official rhetorical invocation of social bonds for unifying the nation in the midst of the national crisis and many citizens’ quiet acts of self-protection and preservation, between the unknown and perhaps unknowable condition of the troubled nuclear reactors in Fukushima and the Japanese government’s official declaration that the nuclear crisis was over, and between the ongoing crisis and the restatement of a dream of economic growth in Abenomics (see also Miyazaki 2014b, 2015, 2016). If Japa nese intellectuals like Murakami sought to embrace the national crisis as an impetus for hope, Prime Minister Abe sought to move past the ongoing crisis and reorient the Japa nese economy, once again, to the future. Japan’s future remains uncertain not only because the crisis stemming from the triple disaster is ongoing but also because the impact of the massive asset purchasing program by Japan’s central bank on the future of the Japanese economy remains unknown. What makes Tawada’s novel interesting for present purposes is its implicit refusal of heroic efforts, like Murakami’s (and Abe’s, as well as those of neoliberal reformers who came before), to break open a blocked future. Tawada’s novel presents a model of simultaneously open and closed futurity that speaks to this volume’s attention to the economy of hope. Like Murakami’s novel, Tawada’s novel is set in near-future Japan, where a sense of closure is overwhelming. The country’s environment has been severely damaged. The core part of Tokyo has become uninhabitable due to a variety of forms of environmental damage and contamination (Tawada 2014: 51–52). Just like the Edo-period shogunate government, the government of Japan once again has closed the country off from the rest of the world by banning overseas travel, foreign news, and foreign words. The novel presents yet another striking sense of closure through a caricature view of Japan’s aging society. In the novel, old people are physically fit and are living seemingly never-ending lives (108), whereas young people are physically struggling and deteriorating to the extent that they are often incapable of moving without assistance. There is no future in a double sense. For old people death has ceased to be a conceivable future, whereas for young people there do not seem to be any opportunities for physical growth.

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In this context, Tawada’s novel offers a formulation of hope that is counter to Murakami’s. As figures of hope, children in the two novels offer contrasting images. Murakami’s children are certainly determined and heroic, whereas Tawada’s children are physically weak and yet playful, and more importantly, their fate is determined by other forces. As in Murakami’s novel, exodus is a key theme in Tawada’s novel. As Bloch repeatedly noted, exodus is a symbol of hope (see also Miyazaki 2016): “There is always an exodus in the world, an exodus from the particular status quo. And there is always a hope, which is connected with rebellion—a hope founded in the concrete given possibilities for new being” (Bloch [1968] 2009: 107). Despite its prominence in the two novels, however, exodus itself does not offer a clear solution to the problem of a blocked future in either of the novels. While Murakami makes explicit his ambivalence and doubt about Ponchan’s heroic exodus at the end of the novel, as discussed earlier, Tawada makes exodus neither heroic nor voluntary. Tawada’s protagonist, also a teenager, is chosen by adults to join a clandestine overseas mission in which he and other children not only will have a chance to learn what is happening outside Japan but also will be medically examined in the hope that they may serve as helpful specimens for the future of people elsewhere. In Tawada’s novel, a particular form of unpredictability and disturbingly unsettling fluidity is instantiated throughout the novel in wordplays and other narrative strategies enabled by the layered structure of closure. In my view, Tawada’s hope resides in these moments. She offers various images of unexpected drifts and slippages into the future. For example, the seven-year-old boy Mumei’s mind constantly drifts away from his immediate tasks (Mumei literally means “no name”). In one of the most memorable passages in the novel, Tawada offers an account of Mumei’s struggle to put on his clothes before going to school. Mumei’s mind drifts away from the immediate task. He thinks of an octopus and of a train going through a tunnel as he puts one leg into his trousers at a time.6 This scene of Mumei’s mind drifting away from the immediate task echoes numerous wordplays. These wordplays prompt seemingly hopeless flows of association. For example, German bread becomes Sanuki bread (Sanuki is an old name of the island of Shikoku in Western Japan) due to the ban on foreign words, which in turn generates people’s interest in visiting Shikoku to explore the origins of the bread (Tawada 2014: 20, 42). Furthermore, this sense of losing control is amplified, albeit still in a playful form, in the children’s favorite game. Mumei, now fifteen, and other similarly physically challenged teens charge down a slope in their wheelchairs

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at full speed and then crash and trip at the bottom of the hill. Mumei’s acceptance of an invitation to join the kentoshi mission leads to a final scene in which various figures and images from his past reappear successively. The novel ends with a deeply disorienting scene in which the protagonist’s “brain” is snatched off by a hand stretched out from his back and is thrown into the dark ocean (Tawada 2014: 159–60).7 These moments are moments in which one’s agency is placed in abeyance (Miyazaki 2004) and moments in which the present is pulled to or abducted by the future. Tawada lets Mumei’s exodus take him to an elsewhere unknown and unknowable. If Murakami embraced the loss of hope and resisted easy claims to its renewal (until Japan’s triple disaster), Tawada’s post-Fukushima novel offers various images of drifts and unexpected slippages into the future. If for Murakami, in the early 2000s, hope resided in the resistance to the easy oscillation between absence and presence, the collective and the individual and the present and the future, for Tawada hope seems to reside in movements and moments created through seemingly hopeless and playful slippages. Unlike Murakami’s novel, closure does not present itself as a condition to be embraced in a heroic fashion in Tawada’s novel. In the novel, closure is the very condition for play, but that play sits on a slippery slope that ultimately only creates a deep and dark form of openness. If Murakami was agnostic about hope, Tawada offers an equally paradoxical, equally uncertain, and yet decisively more playful and transformative formulation of hope. In this juxtaposition of two images of children in exodus, I offer an image of reorientation from heroic hope to less heroic, more playful, and yet ultimately darker hope. The reorientation that materializes in this juxtaposition of the two novels about Japan’s future is a movement from a faith in the power of knowledge (and doubt) to a faith in the power of letting go. Tawada lets the force of spiritual abduction (Battaglia 2006) or that of the abeyance of agency (Miyazaki 2004) take over. Here hope is no longer about heroically breaking open a blocked future. The future may remain blocked and closed, and yet there is a hint of openness, albeit in a distinctively unsettling form. If wordplay and children’s play work together to produce unexpected openness within an overwhelming sense of closure, the unsettling last scene offers another entry way into an elsewhere, but one in which the replicative echoes of openness are at once amplified and canceled out. What Tawada captures is a simulta neously playful and dark cacophony of the past and the future through which hope surfaces as a deeply uncertain and yet radically

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open response to a blocked future. The traces of the movement from Murakami’s heroic “hope against hope” to Tawada’s dark yet playful hope define the parameters of the economy of hope and its underlying interplay of openness and closure that unfolds in this volume.

Notes Th is volume is a result of a series of conferences and conversations on hope I have orga nized with Yuji Genda, Richard Swedberg, and Annelise Riles in Ithaca, New York, and Tokyo over the last ten years. I thank the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Institute for the Social Sciences and the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University, and the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo for their generous support. I thank all participants in these conversations for their imaginative engagement with this topic. A slightly different version of my discussion of Ryu Murakami’s 2000 novel, Kibo no kuni no ekusodasu, in this chapter has appeared in my earlier essay, “The Temporality of No Hope,” published in Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, ed. Carol Green house (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). This chapter has benefited a great deal from numerous conversations with friends, colleagues, and students at Cornell University and elsewhere. I especially thank Leslie Adelson, Anne Allison, Brett de Bary, Yuji Genda, Jane Guyer, Ghassan Hage, Naoki Kasuga, Webb Keane, Liam Lawson, Bill Maurer, Annelise Riles, Naoki Sakai, Richard Swedberg, Shigeki Uno, Katherine Verdery, Clark West, and an anonymous reviewer of this volume for their valuable guidance. I also thank Peter Agree for his trust in me. 1. Hope has been a significant topic of social scientific research as well as of public debate in Japan for over a decade, prompted in part by Murakami’s 2000 novel mentioned in the op-ed piece—Kibo no kuni no ekusodasu (Exodus in a country of hope) (see Miyazaki 2010). 2. There are many ethnographically informed efforts to describe a specific kind of hope at stake in a specific situation. For example, Adam Reed has drawn attention to the kind of hope entertained by Papua New Guinea prisoners on remand (Reed 2011). Likewise, I have drawn attention to two kinds of political hope at stake in indigenous Fijian politics—hope in the means and hope in an end (Miyazaki 2005). While in these efforts a specific kind of hope is contrasted to other kinds of hope or a general theory of hope, in the present effort I seek to draw attention to a movement from one kind of hope to another as part of what I call the economy of hope. 3. Japan’s technoscientific advancement once placed Japan at the forefront of postmodernity. More recently, as prominently expressed in the ongoing debate about the “Japanization” of the U.S. and European economies, Japan’s long-term recession has

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emerged as an ominous prefiguring of the gloomy future of the global economy (Miyazaki 2013; see, e.g., Economist 2011; Krugman 2009; Milne 2011; Summers 2011). 4. The sociologists Walter Powell and Kaisa Snellman “define the knowledge economy as production and ser vices based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technological and scientific advance as well as equally rapid obsolescence. The key components of a knowledge economy include a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources, combined with efforts to integrate improvements in every stage of the production process, from the R&D lab to the factory floor to the interface with customers” (2004: 200). The instrumentalist focus on knowledge in the “knowledge economy” concept has been a subject of intense critical scrutiny in anthropology and adjacent fields for the last decade (see, e.g., Olds and Thrift 2005; Ong 2005; Strathern 2006). 5. Elsewhere I have sought to diverge from these heroic visions of hope vis-à-vis profound uncertainty and unknowability by reformatting hope in terms of rest and sleep following Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar’s reflections on hope (Miyazaki 2014a, 2015; see, e.g., Balthasar 1988, 1998). I have also offered a nonheroic reading of the Book of Job in my effort to theorize hope in post-Fukushima Japan (Miyazaki 2016). 6. Here Tawada contrasts Yoshiro’s mind, which is occupied by worries, to Mumei’s mind, which drifts: Yoshiro’s morning is packed with potential sources of worry, but for Mumei each morning is refreshing and enjoyable. At this moment Mumei is struggling with monsters called clothes. Fabric is not mean, but it cannot be put under control easily. While Mumei struggles with fabric by squishing, spreading and bending it, orange, blue and silver-colored paper starts to fly around and shine in his brain. While Mumei tries to take off his pajamas and wonders which of his two legs he should start with, he thinks of an octopus. Maybe he also has eight legs, and four of them are bundled together on each side so that it may look like he has only two legs. That is probably, he reasons, why his leg wants to move to the left or move up when he tries to move it to the right. An octopus must have gone into his body. “Come out, octopus!” Mumei takes off his pajamas all at once. He now wonders if he by mistake has taken off his legs as well. No, it seems he only has taken off his pajamas. Now that he has taken off his pajamas, he now needs to put on his pants for school. He sees fabric making a hill, and there are tunnels going under the hill. Mumei’s legs are trains. The trains are about to go through the tunnels. Mumei wants to visit the Meiji Restoration Museum again and play with model steam engines. There are two tunnels. One is for trains going away from him. The other is for trains coming towards him. That is the way they are supposed to be, but, strangely, the left leg does not come out while the right leg goes in. That is fine. The skin-colored steam engine is

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going into the tunnel. CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG. . . . Yoshiro asks, “Mumei, have you put your clothes on?” (2014: 112–13; my translation) 7. Tawada makes it clear that getting out of the country or imagining a larger world prompts a kind of mental abduction for Mumei. For example, during a geography lesson in which Mumei observes a map of the world, he loses consciousness and his mind travels to a future moment in which he is fifteen. In this last scene of the novel, Mumei decides to leave Yoshiro for a Kentoshi mission. He reunites with his old neighbor Suiren, toward whom he had a warm feeling when he was younger. Suiren also has been chosen to be on a Kentoshi mission. She suggests to Mumei that he come with her. Without telling Suiren about his own selection as a Kentoshi, he agrees. Here, Tawada inserts the idea of strategic thinking (kakehiki). Mumei hides the fact that he has also been selected as a Kentoshi so that Suiren may think Mumei’s decision was an expression of his willingness to sacrifice his life (Tawada 2014: 159). This is when Mumei and Suiren begin to change their genders. Suiren’s face approaches Mumei’s. The scene blends various images—a lung, a huge bean, a human face, his teacher’s face, and Yoshiro’s face—before Mumei’s “brain” is taken away by the darkness and sinks into the dark ocean (159–60).

References Adelson. Leslie. 2014. “Horizons of Hope: Alexander Kluge’s Cosmic Miniatures and Walter Benjamin.” GegenwartsLiteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 13: 203–25. Allison, Anne. 2014. Precarious Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1988. Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? With a Short Discourse on Hell. Trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius. ———. 1998. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Vol. 5, The Last Act. Trans. Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius. Battaglia, Debbora, ed. 2006. E. T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bloch, Ernst. (1959) 1986. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. (1968) 2009. Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Trans. J. T. Swan. London: Verso. ———. 1998. “Can Hope Be Disappointed?” In Literary Essays. Trans. Andrew Joron et al., 339–44. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Braithwaite, Valerie. 2004. “Preface: Collective Hope.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592(1): 6–15. Brinton, Mary. 2011. Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Morris R. 1923. “On the Logic of Fiction.” Journal of Philosophy 20(18): 477–88. Crapanzano, Vincent. 2003. “Reflections on Hope as a Category of Social and Psychological Analysis.” Cultural Anthropology 18(1): 3–32. Deneen, Patrick J. 1999. “The Politics of Hope and Optimism: Rorty, Havel, and the Democratic Faith of John Dewey.” Social Research 66(2): 577–609. Drucker, Peter. 1968. The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1988. “The Coming of the New Organization.” Harvard Business Review 88: 45–53. Economist. 2011. “Turning Japa nese: The Absence of Leadership in the West Is Frightening—and Also Rather Familiar.” Economist, July 30. http://www.economist .com/node/21524874. Genda, Yuji. (2001) 2005. A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity: The New Reality Facing Japanese Youth. Trans. Jean Connell Hoff. Tokyo: International House of Japan. ———. 2004. Jobu kurieshion [Job creation]. Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha. ———, ed. 2006. Kibogaku [Hope studies]. Tokyo: Chuokoronsha. ———. 2010. Kibo no tsukurikata [The method for creating hope]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Genda, Yuji, and Mie Maganuma. 2005. Nito: Furita demo naku shitsugyosha demo naku [The NEET: Neither freeters nor unemployed]. Tokyo: Gentosha. Greenberg, Jessica. 2014. After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hage, Ghassan. 2003. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press Australia. Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hirschman, Albert O. (1977) 1997. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kant, Immanuel. (1781) 1929. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s. Karatani, Kojin, ed. 2000. Kanonaru komunizumu [Possible communism]. Tokyo: Ota Shuppan. Krugman, Paul. 2009. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. New York: W. W. Norton. Lasch, Christopher. 1991. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: Norton. Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Marcel, Gabriel. (1962) 2010. Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope. Trans. Emma Craufurd and Paul Seaton. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2010. The Paradox of Hope: Journeys Through a Clinical Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Milne, Richard. 2011. “West Shows Worrying Signs of ‘Japanisation.’ ” Financial Times, August  19. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c86470b2-ca7b-11e0 -94d0 - 00144feabdc0 .html#axzz1Xg4V0NpY. Mittleman, Alan. 2009. Hope in a Democratic Age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. “From Sugar Cane to ‘Swords’: Hope and the Extensibility of the Gift in Fiji.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 11(2): 277–95. ———. 2006. “Economy of Dreams: The Production of Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques.” Cultural Anthropology 21(2): 147–72. ———. 2010. “The Temporality of No Hope.” In Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, ed. Carol Greenhouse, 238–50. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2013. Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2014a. “Hope.” In To See Once More the Stars: Living in a Post-Fukushima World, ed. Daisuke Naito, Ryan Sayre, Heather Swanson, and Satsuki Takahashi, 248–49. Santa Cruz: New Pacific. ———. 2014b. “Insistence and Response: On Ethnographic Replication.” Common Knowledge 20(3): 518–26. ———. 2015. “Hope in the Gift—Hope in Sleep.” In Trust and Hope: Negotiating the Future: Dialogues Between Anthropologists and Philosophers, ed. Anne Line Dalsgård, S. Lisberg, Anne Marie Pahuus, and E. O. Pedersen, 209–18. Oxford: Berghahn. ———. 2016. “Hope in the Crack of the Social: Reading the Book of Job in PostFukushima Japan.” In Hope: Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2014, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Block, 369–90. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck. Murakami, Ryu. (2000) 2002. Kibo no kuni no ekusodasu [Exodus in a country of hope]. Tokyo: Bungeishunju. ———. 2011. “Amid Shortages, a Surplus of Hope.” New York Times, March 16. http:// www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/opinion/17Murakami.html. Nonaka, Ikujiro, and Hirotaka Takeuchi. 1995. The Knowledge- Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press. Olds, Kris, and Nigel Thrift. 2005. “Cultures on the Brink: Reengineering the Soul of Capitalism: On a Global Scale.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and

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Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, 270–90. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ong, Aihwa. 2005. “Ecologies of Expertise: Assembling Flows, Managing Citizenship.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, 337–53. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pels, Peter. 2015. “Modern Times: Seven Steps Toward an Anthropology of the Future.” Current Anthropology 56(6): 779–96. Pieper, Josef. (1986) 1997. Faith, Hope, Love. Trans. Richard Winston, Clara Winston, and Sister Mary Frances McCarthy. San Francisco: Ignatius. Powell, Walter W., and Kaisa Snellman. 2004. “The Knowledge Economy.” Annual Review of Sociology 30: 199–220. Redfield, Peter. 2013. Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reed, Adam. 2011. “Hope on Remand.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 17(3): 527–44. Ricoeur, Paul. (1970) 1995. “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems.” In Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, 203–16. Minneapolis: Fortress. Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 19(3): 447–62. Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. Spinoza, Baruch. (1670) 2000. Ethics. Ed. and trans. G. H. R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2006. “A Community of Critics? Thoughts on New Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 12(1): 191–209. Summers, Lawrence. 2011. “How to Avoid Our Own Lost Decade.” Financial Times, June 12. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ b3c143b6 -952d-11e0 -a648- 00144feab49a .html#axzz1Xg4V0NpY. Tawada, Yoko. 2014. Kentoshi [Missions to dedicate light]. Tokyo: Kodansha. Thrift, Nigel. 2005. Knowing Capitalism. London: SAGE. University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science and Yuji Genda, eds. 2013. Kibogaku, ashita no mukoni: Kibo no Fukui, Fukui no kibo [Hope studies, beyond tomorrow: Hopeful Fukui, hope in Fukui]. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Yuji Genda, and Shigeki Uno, eds. 2009a. Kibo wo kataru: shakai kagaku no arata na chihei e [Talk about hope: Toward a new horizon in the social sciences]. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. ———. 2009b. Kibo no hajimari: ryudokasuru sekai de [Hope’s beginning: In a fluid world]. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Naofumi Nakamura, and Yuji Genda, eds. 2014. Mochiba no kibogaku: Kamaishi to shinsai, mouhitotsu no kioku [Hope

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studies in one’s place of responsibility: Kamaishi and the earthquake, another memory]. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Vaihinger, Hans. (1924) 2000. The Philosophy of “As If ”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical, and Religious Fictions of Mankind. Trans. Charles Kay Ogden. London: Routledge. Verdery, Katherine. 1995. “Faith, Hope, and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids: Romania, 1990 to 1994.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(4): 625–69. Vogel, Ezra. 1979. Japan as Number One: Lessons for America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yamada, Masahiro. 2004. Kibo kakusa shakai [The stratified hope society]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. Zournazi, Mary. 2003. Hope: New Philosophies for Change. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 1

A Sociological Approach to Hope in the Economy Richard Swedberg

The main aim of this chapter is to confront two topics with one another that are usually kept apart: hope and the economy. Since I am a sociologist, I will try to do this from a sociological perspective, that is, with an eye toward society and the way that it influences things. I will first say something about the way that sociologists have looked at hope, and then suggest a way in which one can approach the role of hope in the economy from a sociological perspective.

Sociologists on Hope Sociologists have paid very little attention to hope, and what they have said is fragmentary in nature. It would seem that the classics were more interested in hope than modern sociologists have been, even if it never was at the center of their attention. It is also clear that sociologists have mostly seen hope in an empirical rather than a normative way. Take, for example, the analysis of hope that can be found in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. There is, first of all, the theory of the so-called Tocqueville effect, which is derived from Tocqueville’s study in The Old Regime and the Revolution ([1856] 1998). The Tocqueville effect refers to the fact that toward the end of the eighteenth century some reforms were carried out in France, and it was precisely in the areas where these were the most successful that the revolution received the most support from the population. The

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reason for this, Tocqueville suggests, is that when things improve, people’s hope that things can get better is awakened (236). Hope also plays an empirical role in Tocqueville’s class analysis. One effect of the increasing leveling of society, according to Democracy in America, is that people begin to hope for material things that they never even thought of in the old class society. The poor in the United States, Tocqueville noted on his trip to this country in 1831–32, had a “hope and longing” for the things that the rich were consuming (Tocqueville 2004: 618). Democracy breaks down the barriers between people, and this allows hope to be awakened and extend in new directions. Another example of hope and class in Tocqueville’s work is the following. One of the major reasons that France had a violent revolution but England did not, Tocqueville argues, has to do with the way that their respective aristocracies acted. The English aristocracy held out the promise that a few successful individuals one day could join its ranks, while the French aristocracy did not—with resentment and hatred toward the French aristocracy emerging as a result. The point was not so much whether people actually did join the aristocracy, Tocqueville says, but that they felt that the chance was there—the hope (see, e.g., Tocqueville 1862: 221). While Tocqueville was an observer that posterity has labeled a sociologist, Max Weber was a professional sociologist. And just as with Tocqueville, one can only find scattered references to hope in his work. These scattered references are typically empirical rather than normative. An entrepreneur, to mention one example, has the “hope” to make more money than he would if he just left the money in the bank (Weber 1946: 97). The two areas in his work where Weber uses the idea of hope the most frequently are in his political sociology and in his sociology of religion. Weber especially refers to hope when he speaks of the early working-class movement, which was inspired by Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto, he says, is suff used with hope, just as hope underpins Marx’s idea that socialism will one day come into being through the collapse of capitalism (Weber 1994: 288, 294). Weber also refers to hope in his discussion of the attitude of the poor to religion; and here he says that hope constitutes a “robust motive” (Weber 1946: 79). What motivates those who are “negatively privileged” in their attitude to religion is “hope for salvation” and “hope for compensation” (see Weber 1946: 273; 1978: 172). Charismatic leaders may also channel the hope of people and tend to appear in situations of despair.

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Emile Durkheim was much more interested in the general phenomenon of hope than either Weber or Tocqueville, and he also addressed it in an original and speculative manner. The place where he does this is primarily in The Division of Labor in Society ([1893] 1984), more precisely in his discussion of the role of happiness in the evolution of society (cf. Neves 2003). Durkheim firmly resists the utilitarians’ idea that happiness represents the goal of mankind and that one can find an increase of happiness in recent history. On the contrary, he says, many countries experienced an important increase in suicide during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, there is plenty of hope around, and room for a reasoned optimism. What especially makes Durkheim’s argument interesting for the perspective in this chapter is how he accounts for the origin of hope. Hope can in principle be seen as either a biological product or a social product. Durkheim leans toward the latter alternative, but he does so in a normative way. He suggests that the reason why people can feel hope and be hopeful is that they have good reasons for believing that things will turn out well in the end. The central passage in The Division of Labor in Society reads as follows: [Hope] has not miraculously fallen from heaven into our hearts, but must have, like all the sentiments, been formed under the influence of the facts. Thus if men have learnt to hope, if under the blows of misfortune they have grown accustomed to turn their gaze towards the future and to expect from it compensation for their present suffering, it is because they have perceived that such compensation occurred frequently, that the human organism was both too flexible and too resisting to be easily brought down, that the moments when misfortune gained the day were exceptional and that generally the balance ended up by being re-established. (Durkheim [1893] 1984: 190) Is it then hope that stops people from committing suicide? Durkheim hesitates to answer yes, even if he does not rule out the possibility that there is a link between the instinct of self-preservation and hope. He writes, “Consequently, whatever the role of hope in the genesis of the instinct of selfpreservation, that instinct is a convincing testimony to the relative goodness of life. For the same reason, where that instinct loses its power or generality we may be sure that life itself loses its attractiveness, that misfortune increases, either because the causes of suffering multiply or because the capacity for resistance on the part of the individual diminishes” (ibid.).

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Just like classical sociology, modern sociology is incomplete and fragmentary in its analysis of hope (see, e.g., Berger 1969; Desroche 1979; Caspar 1981). And just like classical sociology, modern sociology seems to prefer to discuss concepts that are in some way related to the concept of hope, rather than hope itself—such as trust, expectations, aspirations, drive, and the like. This is also true for the growing branch called the sociology of emotions, which sometimes touches on hope but prefers to focus on the major and more impor tant emotions (see, e.g., Barbalet 1998: 150). An interesting and rare attempt to turn hope into a useful empirical concept can be found in a lecture by Ralf Dahrendorf entitled “Inequality, Hope, and Progress” (1976). The author begins by making a sharp distinction between “utopian hope” and “realistic hope.” The former he describes by pointing to the early writings by Marx, Herbert Marcuse’s notion of a multidimensional man, and Jürgen Habermas’s project of human communication. “Realistic hope,” in contrast, refers to what is concrete and possible to achieve. Dahrendorf also calls it “effective hope.” His main thesis is that social inequality serves as an important incentive for people to better their condition by awakening a realistic or effective hope in them. From the perspective of hope and the economy, Dahrendorf ’s enumeration of situations in which hope plays an important role in energizing people into action is of interest. “Hope . . . based on experience,” he says, can be awakened by “the villa one has seen on a Sunday morning walk, the television fi lm about skiing holidays, or even about the rich man’s trip to Monte Carlo, the advertisement of a new sports-car” (1976: 14). He continues, “Such hope motivates people to change their conditions, or their lives, in a variety of ways. It may be a stimulus for the individual to move, either geographically, or in the scales of social status. It may be a challenge for solitary action, in associations, trade unions, political groups, in order to gain shorter working hours for all members. It may be international action, the demand for more voting rights in the International Monetary Fund, or membership in OECD” (ibid.). The reason why realistic hope is also effective hope is that it constitutes a very practical kind of hope, ready to be translated into reality: “In all cases such hope is coupled with demands for change which are capable of implementation, specific demands, promotion or a salary increase, the forty-eight-hour or forty-hour week, new uses for special drawing rights, and the like. Whether every change brought about under social conditions in which action is sparked off by realistic hope is progress, may be open to

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doubt; but if there is to be any progress at all, such hope is one of its ingredients” (ibid.). While Dahrendorf in his discussion of realistic hope comes very close to supplying the reader with an operational definition of hope, no such definition is actually given. One of our colleagues, however, who heard about our interest in hope and the economy, has kindly made an attempt in this direction, and we offer it as part of this discussion of hope as a social science concept. Hans Zetterberg, a well-known expert on survey research, wrote to us apropos hope that he very much would like to have the following question asked on an annual basis in countries all over the world: “Do you think that the children who are growing up today will have it better or worse than you have it, when they are your age?” (Zetterberg 2005). Perhaps this can be labeled projected hope or, better, hope for others. Zetterberg’s approach to hope—survey research in which you ask someone to compare the situation today to that of tomorrow—also points to a whole genre of existing research. To cite one example among many: the surveys on “optimism” and “pessimism” by Gallup International. This organization typically carries out research in fifty to sixty countries simultaneously, and tries to establish if their inhabitants are optimistic or pessimistic. This is measured with the help of questions on the theme of “Do you think next year will be better than this year?” There are also questions that attempt to look at the economic dimensions of this theme, such as the economic prospect in general, whether unemployment will increase, and the like (see, e.g., Gallup International 2005). This type of research leads in a natural way to the question of whether there exists a relationship between the idea of hope in the economy and surveys of consumer confidence. These surveys are very common in contemporary society, where they are closely followed by politicians and business people. Surveys of consumer confidence trace their origin to the pioneering work of George Katona, in particular his Index of Consumer Sentiment from 1952. The two most cited surveys of consumer confidence in the United States today are the Consumer Confidence Index (produced by the Conference Board) and the Index of Consumer Sentiment (produced at the University of Michigan). The questions that are asked in this type of survey include the following: “Looking ahead, do you think a year from now you (and your family living there) will be better off financially, worse off or just about the same as now?” and “Turning to business conditions in the country as a whole, do you think that during the next 12 months we’ll have good times

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financially or bad times or what?” (Weiss 2003). Results from surveys of consumer confidence indicate that young people have more confidence in the future than old people, and well-off people more than poor people. The notion of consumer confidence overlaps to some extent with that of hope, but there also exist significant differences between the two. The most important of these is that while surveys of consumer confidence are interested in establishing what will happen, hope is more about what one wants or wishes to happen. It is true that what will happen and what one wants to happen may coincide. But even when this is the case, there is a complexity to the notion of hope that goes well beyond the standard measure of consumer confidence. What so far represents the most impressive and important attempt to approach the topic of hope through survey research has been made at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, in connection with the project of Hope Studies (2005–). The background to this research is the sense that has arisen in the past few years among people in Japan that the country lacks hope; hence the interest among some of its social scientists in this topic. The main survey by this institute, undertaken in 2006, found that the majority of the country’s population (roughly 80 percent) had hope and that the majority of these (some 60  percent) also believed that they would be able to realize this hope within a reasonable amount of time (Genda 2007). People, it turned out, hoped for different things; for males, hope was typically attached to work. Not only individuals but also households were researched, and wealthy households had more hope than poor households. Yuji Genda—the main researcher behind this work—concludes that the data does not allow one to determine if hope has actually declined or increased in Japan. Since Japanese society, however, has increasing numbers of old people, more unemployment, and certain other features, and since these factors have been shown to be associated with low levels of hope, Japan may very well be heading in the direction of less hope. To fully evaluate the situation in Japan, it can be added, one would also need comparative data, something that does not seem to exist today. While the Gallup International survey of 2005 uses very different questions from those that were used in Japan, one of its fi ndings should nonetheless be mentioned: the level of optimism varied quite a bit between regions as well as between countries (31 percent and 26  percent, respectively). Does hope, one wonders, vary in a similar way? One also wonders what the results would have been in Japan if qualitative research methods had been used, such as in-depth interviews, partici-

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pant observation, and the like. Would these be able to answer some questions that are hard to get at with survey research? Would they, for example, validate the approach of someone like sociologist Zygmund Bauman? According to Bauman, one can find hope in many situations where people have no objective reason whatsoever to be hopeful: “Hope is stronger than all imaginable ‘testimony of reality.’ ” “Hope needs no proof,” he also says. “Hope is valid and real even if groundless” (Bauman 2004: 67). In brief, the relationship of hope to empirical reality is complex and raises questions that may require many different types of methods to explore.

A Suggestion for How to Study the Role of Hope in the Economy Given the absence of a concept of hope that can be easily used for empirical sociological work, I will now try to provide such a concept. In doing so, I will start from the view of hope as the wish for something to come true. There are several elements to this description or definition that need to be discussed, but for the moment their unity and overall meaning should be stressed. When one has hope, one does not wish for something abstract, but for something precise. One also wants this wish for this something precise to be realized. Whether it ultimately can or will be realized is not known, but this does not stop the actor from hoping that it will. Hope, in short, is characterized by a certain type of uncertainty, but not because it cannot be calculated (Frank Knight’s type of uncertainty). The reason is that the actor is not interested in calculating the uncertainty. There are three distinct elements to the description of hope that has just been presented, and each of them deserves attention: (1) the wish (2) for something (3) to come true (see Fig. 1.1). That hope can be called a wish reminds us of the fact that while hope is not regarded as a sentiment, it is often seen as being close to a sentiment. Its cognitive element is low, even if not absent. One feels hope, and one is usually also aware of its existence. Whether there is a biological dimension to hope, as there is to emotions, is hard to say. Anthropological data indicates that hope can be found in most cultures—but that is all. That hope is hope for something means that hope typically does not exist by itself, but rather attaches itself to something else. This gives it a certain elusive and secondary quality that may also help to explain why hope has not

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I.

II.

III.

Hope = the wish

for something

to come true

The core of hope is a wish. This wish is for something, and this something has For this something a social dimension. to become true, it has to become true in society and through interactions with other people. Figure 1.1. Hope and its links to society. It is impor tant to look at hope in a way that allows the social science perspective to be applied to it.

attracted as much attention as related phenomena that, so to speak, stand on their own legs, such as fear, anger, or shame. While it may or may not be the case that the core of hope is social (we do not know), it does get linked to the social element through its attachment to something special. In one type of society (or group), one can hope for items a, b, and c, and in another for d, e, and f. The social sciences, in other words, can be brought into the analysis of hope at precisely this point. The third and last element of hope is that it includes the wish for something to come true. This means, for one thing, that hope has a goal to which it points. The formulation I have used is “to come true” rather than “to be realized,” since hope does not have the direct and instrumental quality of the latter expression. Hope, it can be added, is always rooted in a person. It can remain in the person or it can reach out from the person toward reality. This remains true, whether hope has become a common good or not. In the case that hope reaches out into the world, outside the person, there is another opening for the social sciences, because something can usually not become true unless there is assistance or acceptance from other

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people. If one’s environment, for example, is very positive to something, there is more of a chance that this something will be hoped for, and that it will become true. It would also seem that certain types of hope and ways to realize it may become so ingrained or characteristic for certain groups and societies that they qualify as social facts in Durkheim’s sense. They constitute the “normal” way to hope, and divergences from them are accompanied by a sense of coercion and possibly also by sanctions from other people. People may, for example, hope for a certain type of family in modern society (say, one boy and one girl), for a certain way to die in modern society (say, in your own home), and so on. Hope as a collective good belongs here. But there may be more to hope and its social dimension than this. In one of his works Søren Kierkegaard speaks of hope as fair wind filling the sails and pushing the wish for something to its goal. But he also makes the interesting comment that hope can, so to speak, overtake its object and lessen its chances of being realized (Kierkegaard [1843] 1987: 1:292). Th is is where hope goes from being helpful to preventing its object from coming into being and sometimes even destroying it. Again, a door is opened up to empirical social study since it is easy to imagine situations where the individual succumbs to overenthusiasm precisely because of what other people do. One can partially illustrate the view of hope that has been advanced in this chapter with the help of a diagram with two dimensions. One of these denotes whether hope stays within the person or whether the person will also try to realize it in reality (passive-active). The other dimension attempts to capture the quality that hope is useful in certain doses—to get the wishing going—but that it also can become so strong that it overwhelms the normal unfolding of hope and prevents it from becoming true (inspiring-overtaking; see Fig. 1.2). Before discussing what this approach to hope implies for the study of hope and the economy, something also needs to be said about hopelessness. The notion of hopelessness is often mentioned in discussions of hope, but it is not theorized in its own right. It is typically seen as the opposite of hope, sometimes as fear and sometimes as a lack of hope. My own view is that this way of looking at hopelessness may well be wrong. Hopelessness, I suggest, is a phenomenon in its own right and as important to study as hope. It is not simply the opposite or negation of hope but can throw new light on the nature of hope. More precisely, while hope

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overtaking

A

B

passive

active

C

D

inspiring Figure 1.2. Two dimensions of hope. Hope can either be centered inside a person or be oriented toward actions by the person on the outside; hope can also work as an inspiration for the object/action of hope or it can overtake or overpower the attempt to realize it.

would seem to always attach itself to something, hopelessness indicates that hope may be more general than this. People with no hope, it is often noted, are people who feel hopeless in general, not just in relation to some special item or need. The notion of hopelessness evokes associations with Jean-Paul Sartre’s view of hope as infusing a person’s major enterprise in life, rather than just some specific project (Sartre 1996). Hope, from this perspective, may be understood as a capacity that people have. It also seems to indicate that this capacity is brittle, and, once destroyed, that something important is lacking in the individual. Again, we have an entry point for the social sciences here, to the extent that the destruction of the capacity for hope comes from the outside. It can,

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for example, have been caused by some specific event; and relevant events may vary from society to society. Perhaps also the opposite is true, namely that the capacity to hope can be strengthened under certain circumstances. Can it perhaps also be restored, once it has been destroyed? We do not know. If one applies this view of hope to the economy, one can get a sense for some of the topics that can be analyzed with the help of the social sciences. As to the element of wish, it would seem that people wish for economic things because of scarcity, among other reasons: there is just not enough of everything for everybody. It would also seem that people primarily wish for material matters when it comes to the economy. This would mean that wishes of this type are more aimed toward the outer world than toward the inner world. Interestingly enough, however, this may not always be the case. People have plenty of economic dreams and wishes about the economy. The second element of hope—that it always is a wish for something— takes on a special meaning in the world of the economy. One may wish for a fortune, a good job, success in business, and so on. As earlier mentioned, this element has a direct link to the social in the sense that different groups and societies have different economic items to which hope can be attached. In a feudal society, the peasant may hope for a nonrapacious lord; in a capitalist society, for a decent employer, and so on. Similarly, the third element—the wish for something to come true—is played out according to its own logic in the world of the economy. If the person knows what to do, the chance of realizing the hope will grow. Hope can also get the person going and be the hiding hand that Albert O. Hirschman (1967) speaks about. But if hope overtakes the action to realize the hope, the entrepreneur may go wrong, ending up as a speculator or a reckless investor (see Fig. 1.3). Ways of hoping that involve the economy may finally also congeal into social facts that people see as “normal” and “natu ral,” unless they deviate from them (in which case they are experienced as coercive). In the case of the economy one may hope, for example, for a good job (which allows the individual to realize himself or herself), to make money by starting one’s own firm, and so on. Finally, hopelessness can have a paralyzing effect, spreading from the area of the economy to the rest of a person’s life. In the famous study from the 1930s of the unemployed in Marienthal, Austria, such a situation is discussed (Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel [1933] 1971). The authors divide the

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overtaking

economic utopias

irrational exuberance gold digging

economic fatalism the American Dream

passive

active buying lottery tickets economic dreams

creative economic actions

hope for a good job

possibilism entrepreneurship

inspiring Figure 1.3. Two dimensions of hope and the economy. Economic actions are primarily concerned with the outer rather than the inner sphere. But as the examples in the figure show, some interesting economic topics belong to the inner sphere. The specific items mentioned in the figure may also shift around a bit, depending on the circumstances. The American Dream may be seen as a social fact that involves hope.

unemployed families into three categories: “unbroken,” “resigned,” and “broken.” In the authors’ terminology, the unbroken have hope, the resigned have no hope, and the broken feel hopeless. The purpose of the discussion in the second part of this chapter has not been to develop a general theory of hope, and then apply it to the economy. Instead it has been to look at hope in a way that opens it up for social science study, especially the sociological and empirical study of hope and the economy. I have indicated two places where hope has direct links to society: one hopes for something and for this something to come true. Hopelessness also

A Sociological Approach to Hope in the Economy

group membership of the actor (class, gender, etc.)

Hope = the wish

for something

consumer culture including advertisement

49

economic, social, and cultural capital of the actor

to come true

economic opportunity structure

economic institutions and material resources

Figure 1.4. Hope and its links to economy and society. The figure shows some social influences on hope relating to the economy in modern capitalist society. The influences relate to (1) the object of hope and (2) how it can be realized. Ways of hoping may also congeal into social facts, which people see as “natural” and from which deviations are felt as coercive.

appears to be caused by social forces. All of these cases, I argue, invite further discussion, reflection, and empirical research (see Fig. 1.4).

References Barbalet, Jack. 1998. Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Zygmund. 2004. “To Hope Is Human.” Tikkum 19(6): 64–67. Berger, Peter. 1969. A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural. New York: Doubleday. Caspar, Ruth. 1981. “ ‘All Shall Be Well’: Prototypical Symbols of Hope.” Journal of the History of Ideas 42(1): 139–50. Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1976. Inequality, Hope, and Progress. Eleanor Rathbone Memorial Lecture. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Desroche, Henri. 1979. The Sociology of Hope. Boston: Routledge. Durkheim, Emile. (1893) 1984. The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press.

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Gallup International. 2005. “Survey Findings: Voice of the People.” Press release. December 20. Genda, Yuji. 2007. “Why Has Hope Been Lost in Japan?” Paper presented October 14 at Cornell University. Hirschman, Albert O. 1967. Development Projects Observed. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Jahoda, Marie, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel. [1933] 1971. Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community. New York: Aldine. Kierkegaard, Søren. (1843) 1987. Either/Or. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Neves, Carlos. 2003. “Optimism, Pessimism, and Hope in Durkheim.” Journal of Happiness Studies 4: 169–83. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1996. Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tocqueville, Alexis de. (1856) 1998. The Old Regime and the Revolution. Vol. 1. Trans. Alan S. Kahan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1862. “France Before the Revolution.” In Memoir, Letters, and Remains, vol. 1, 204–52. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. ———. 2004. Democracy in America. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Library of America. Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber. Ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1994. Political Writings. Ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weiss, Michael. 2003. “Inside Consumer Confidence.” American Demographics 25(1): 23–29. Zetterberg, Hans. 2005. E-mail to Richard Swedberg dated June 1.

CHAPTER 2

Mercantilist-Utopian Projects in Eighteenth-Century Sweden Richard Swedberg

During the eighteenth century several waves of collective hope went through Sweden, some of which were to leave permanent marks on the country.1 First and foremost, many Swedes hoped for better economic times, since it was generally understood that peace had now replaced war on a permanent basis. Some people in the ruling elite no doubt hoped that Sweden would regain its status as a military power. But there were also those in the elite who hoped to turn their country, which at this point in time was poor and underdeveloped, into one with a rich, powerful, and self-sufficient economy. To accomplish this they initiated a number of utopian and hopeful economic projects. They tried, for example, to cultivate silk, coffee, and tea. They also started up a number of enterprises in the hope of replacing imports that they found wasteful. It is with these utopian and hopeful economic activities that this chapter is primarily concerned. The general mode of thought within which these hopeful economic plans for the Swedish kingdom were conceived, and which also dominated official thought in Sweden at the time, is usually referred to as “mercantilism.” In short, these plans were developed within an economic worldview according to which the national economy was seen as a household, and the main task of the rulers was to manage the resources of the country well, and thereby increase its wealth or surplus (see, e.g., Heckscher 1935; Karlsson 1992; Magnusson 1991; Runefelt 2001). Moneymaking and trade were primarily to be

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ECONOMICS

oeconomia (householding)

home economics

mercantilist economics

chrematistics (moneymaking, profit making)

economics of the welfare state; socialist economics

modern economics

Figure 2.1. The two faces of economics. Ideas about economic life were from antiquity onward centered on the household, but they shifted in the 1800s to profit making and related activities as economics became a modern science. Theories that emphasize the household include home economics, mercantilist economics, socialist economics, and economics of the welfare state. Mercantilist economics took several different expressions, and in this chapter the focus is on Swedish mercantilist thought.

carried out for the needs of the household and not to amass capital, as in a modern capitalist economy.

The Setting: Sweden in the 1700s The death of King Charles XII in 1718 and related events in the Great Northern War spelled an end to what is known in Swedish history as the Age of Empire (Stormaktstiden). There had been war during 75 of the 120 years that the Age of Empire lasted (1600–1720), and the cost of these wars had been enormous to the country. All types of social, political, and economic progress had also been blocked, and Sweden had had little chance to develop in other ways than as a military power.

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But without the need for a powerful military presence abroad, the country was poised to turn in a new direction. The energy that had earlier been turned outward, to war and conquest, was now turned inward and devoted to the development of the country. Some people in the ruling circles no doubt hoped that this might help the country to reemerge as a grand power, once the current military setbacks had been overcome. Nonetheless, the 1700s in Sweden were going to be characterized by peace and prosperity, as opposed to war and bad finances, as had been the case during the Age of Empire. Especially the years 1720–72 were in many respects full of hope, and they are known in Swedish history as the Age of Freedom (Frihetstiden). In the rest of this chapter I will present and analyze three cases of mercantilist-utopian projects that all involved the economy during the Age of Freedom, and in which hope played an important role. They were all undertaken to make the country prosperous and rich. In order to give the reader a chance to view these cases in their natural context, I will first provide some background information. The political elite essentially saw its task as being to rule Sweden according to the dictates of tradition, the laws that had been laid down in the Bible (Lutheranism), and the ideology of mercantilism. Its main responsibility was to develop the state and the public household so that Sweden once more could become a strong and powerful nation. This meant that the resources of the kingdom had to be managed wisely, including the population. The Swedish state had already initiated a mercantilist policy in the 1600s, which was continued in the 1700s. There was especially a deep concern with developing a favorable balance of trade, which led to repeated attempts to reduce imports and encourage exports. According to legislation from the 1720s, for example, foreign ships that sailed to Sweden were not allowed to carry merchandise from countries other than their own. Members of the nobility were forbidden to wear non-Swedish clothes at special occasions. A number of laws and regulations were also passed that had as their main goal the encouragement of the production in Sweden of goods that were typically imported from other countries, such as textiles, porcelain, tobacco, and so on. These economic units that were to produce these were referred to as manufactories (manufakturer), and a special state agency was created in 1739 to encourage their existence. The population of Sweden was predominantly agrarian and traditionalistic in spirit. Peasants made up the overwhelming majority of the population, while the aristocracy and the gentry only amounted to a small

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Table 2.1. Composition of the Population in 1760 in Sweden Proper and in Finland Sweden

Finland

“Gentlefolk” and servantsa Lower state employees, etc.b Townsmen and their servantsc Rural population (except soldiers, nobility, etc.)d

90,311 180,221 122,370 1,444,769

4.9% 9.8% 6.7% 78.6%

17,324 74,432 18,773 381,279

3.5% 14.7% 3.9% 77.9%

Total population

1,837,671

100.0%

489,808

100.0%

Source: Heckscher 1954: 141. Note: The available data about the population has been arranged according to profession or estate or a combination of the two. a Contains the following categories: nobility, clergymen and teachers, gentry, and servants. b Contains the following categories: soldiers, court and church servants, etc. c Contains the following categories: merchants, manufacturers, craftsmen, shippers and sailors, other burghers, and servants. d Contains the following categories: iron and metal makers, miners, rural craftsmen, militia, rural shippers and sailors, peasants, cottagers, paupers and crofters, laps (samis), settlers, etc.

percentage. But there were already signs that the movement away from a social system based on estates toward one based on social class had begun, and the line between the various estates was becoming blurred. A large number of people were also in one way or another employed by the powerful Swedish state, and they will play an important role in the story that is told in this chapter. Besides traditional artisans, there was also a growing number of workers, especially in the manufactories. The population of Sweden grew rapidly during the eighteenth century, something that was noted with satisfaction in mercantilist circles, where a huge population was equated with wealth and prosperity. The population of Sweden proper (Sweden minus Finland) was 1.44 million in 1720, 1.78 million in 1750, and 2.35 million in 1800. This growth was faster than Sweden had ever experienced before, and it stood in sharp contrast to the 1600s, when the population had declined due to the hardships that came with the constant wars. According to Eli Heckscher, Sweden’s foremost economic historian, “A new spirit descended on the country [in the 1700s]. . . . All minds were concerned with material improvement” (1954: 131). Th is included the peasants, whose economic situation improved steadily during this period. One reason for this positive development was a concern with the population on the

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part of the state; another had to do with the opening up of new land to be farmed. But even if ways to improve agriculture fascinated the ruling circles of Sweden during this period and became expressed as a general “agricultural optimism,” as one economic historian has put it, this paled in comparison to their positive attitude toward the manufactories (Magnusson 1996: 209). Here, according to Heckscher, we may truly speak of “enthusiasm” (1954: 162). It was felt that it was imperative for Sweden to replace the goods that were imported with domestically produced items, and much energy as well as huge sums of money were devoted to this task. The arts and sciences also went through a period of enthusiastic growth during the Age of Freedom. Neither before nor after has Sweden had so many brilliant scientists and academics as during that century. Several of these individuals are still household names, such as Carl von Linné (with his classification of flowers), Anders Celsius (with his thermometer), and Emanuel Swedenborg (with his ideas on heaven and hell). Historians of science will also be familiar with the names of Christopher Polhem (mechanics), Nils Rosén von Rosenstein (pediatrics), Torbern Bergman (chemistry), and Carl Wilhelm Scheele (chemistry). Thanks to the efforts of Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin, Sweden also became the first country in the world to produce reliable population statistics (starting in 1749). There were some other splendid accomplishments as well, in astronomy, mathematics, and so on (see, e.g., Lindroth 1975). The main institutional vehicle for many of these accomplishments was the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which was created in 1739 and which today is mainly known for the Nobel Prize. While it had been modeled after the Royal Society in London (1660) and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris (1666), it differed from these and similar institutions elsewhere in Europe in that it primarily saw its task as economic, and economic more in the sense of the household than of the market. According to the original plan for the academy, its name was to have been the Economic Academy of Science (ekonomisk vetenskapssocietet). While it was eventually given a different name, the main purpose of the academy remained the same, namely to increase the wealth of the Swedish household by means of science. “No science in the world is more important than that of economics,” as one of its prominent members put it (Linné). Another argued that “the economy is the goal [of society]” (Polhem), and a third that “the art of the household” is “the most important and inclusive of all the sciences; it is the sea into which all the rivers flow” (Wargentin; see Heckscher 1942a: 43).

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Given the great interest that existed for the economy as a household in eighteenth-century Sweden, it was natural that a huge number of pamphlets and books on this topic should be produced. According to a statistical study, the production of works on the economy during this century goes well beyond anything that can be found in Swedish history either before or after it  (Heckscher 1942a: 37). While the peak was reached during the mideighteenth century, the two main authors of economic writings before 1730 were Swedenborg and Polhem—a reminder that the lines between economics and the other sciences were drawn differently in the 1700s from how they are today. Sweden was also the second country in the world to institute professorships in economics, following Germany, where three chairs in cameralism had been created in 1727–30. In 1741 a chair in economics was instituted in Uppsala University, followed by one in Åbo in 1747, in Lund in 1750, and a second in Uppsala in 1759. The last chair was to be devoted to “practical economy” (praktisk oeconomie), a name that gives an indication of how the subject of economics was seen at the time in Sweden, namely as a way to practically further the wealth of a country by encouraging growth in agriculture, manufactories, and householding more generally. Linné was the main force behind the creation of the last three chairs, and he also saw to it that these were fi lled by his own students—who had been trained primarily in botany and natural history. That economics was a very different science in eighteenth-century Sweden from what it is today can also be illustrated by the case of Anders Berch, the holder of the first chair in economics in Sweden (1711–74). Berch started out by publishing a work in political arithmetic that was very much in the tradition of William Petty and contained a number of optimistic calculations, including that Sweden could easily support a much larger population than the current one. This was followed by a work in mercantilist theory that was to become the main textbook in economics for the next eighty years in Sweden, Introduction to General Householding (1747).

Project #1: The Hopeful Inventory of the Swedish Economy with the Help of Political Arithmetic The first example I have chosen to illustrate the role that hope played in the Swedish economy during the eighteenth century has to do with the inven-

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tory of the country’s resources that was undertaken with the help of political arithmetic and other quantitative measures. This type of inventory played a very important role in Sweden during the 1700s and resulted in innumerable reports and discussions in Congress as well as in learned circles. The general sentiment that accompanied and partly inspired these was to a large extent hope—the hope that Sweden was a rich and wealthy country, and that you only had to properly locate its riches for these to begin to materialize. According to the standard work on this part of Swedish history, the atmosphere in which this inventory was carried out can be described as “a wild and somewhat crazy optimism, perhaps unique in Swedish social history” (Johannisson 1988: 111). The reason for making this inventory in the first place had much to do with the view of the economy as a household: to manage a household well, one needed to know its resources. What drove this type of enterprise was consequently not so much the idea of profit making by way of business enterprises as the idea of creating wealth through the skilled management of one’s resources. If profit-making enterprises increased the wealth of the country, they were accepted from a mercantilist perspective—but not other wise. Quantitative measures were important in making an inventory because they allowed for a precise and scientific estimate of the resources. “All depends on economic description,” to cite the country’s first professor of economics (Berch, quoted in Heckscher 1942a: 54). The idea of measuring the country’s resources in an exact manner also appealed to the scientific temper of the time, and, as we soon shall see, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences played a key role in these efforts. The main quantitative tool that was available at the time for undertaking the inventory of Sweden was not statistics, but a predecessor to statistics known as political arithmetic. This way of proceeding had been pioneered by John Graunt and Petty in the late 1600s in England, and it differed from modern statistics on several accounts (see, e.g., Petty 1899; Mahiev 1998). For one thing, the primary goal of political arithmetic was to assist the king in better knowing the riches and resources of his kingdom. In this sense, political arithmetic grew organically out of mercantilism, to which it is also historically linked. Political arithmetic furthermore had a strongly normative bent, in that it was interested not only in what the wealth of a country amounted to, but also in establishing how much it could amount to. And finally, while political arithmetic typically started out with some precise and

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Table 2.2. The Two Main Categories of Economic Activity: Householding and Profit Making Goals

Means

Key Institutions

Macroeffect

Householding

surplus and wealth, satisfaction of needs, independence (autarchy)

management of resources (based on use value), inventory, patriarchal order

the estate, the individual household, at times the state

reproduction, slow economic growth

Profit making

profit, capital accumulation, dynamic growth

profit-making activities (based on exchange value)

the market, the corporation

economic change, creative destruction, expansion

Note: Economic activities can, according to Max Weber (1978: 86–90), be conceptualized as belonging to either the category of householding or that of profit making. Examples of household economies would include the original Greek estate (oikos), the manorial estate, the modern household of the nuclear family, and the socialist state. Mercantilism and cameralism can roughly be characterized as economic doctrines about the household of the state, just as home economics and household economics can be said to constitute an economic doctrine about the modern family or household.

quantitative observations of reality, it often proceeded to bold and strange generalizations on the basis of these observations. Political arithmetic reached Sweden in the 1700s, partly due to the efforts of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Berch also published a book on this topic a few years after being appointed to the chair in economics in Uppsala, entitled Ways in Which to Investigate the Household Management of Countries and States Through Political Arithmetic (1746). Most of this work is generally considered to be lacking in independence, but on at least one point Berch added something of his own. This was his estimate of the population of Sweden, its current size as well as its potential size. What was new about this was not only the choice of Sweden as his example, but also the optimist vein in which Berch carried out his work. In the spirit of Petty, Berch began his calculation of Sweden’s population from the fact that it has one hundred thousand hemman (a geographic unit used for taxation in the countryside). He then assumed that each of these hemman holds between one and sixteen families, and that each family (depending on the size of its land) has either eight members (two parents, four children, and two helping hands) or seven members (two parents, four children, and one helping hand). This gave a total of 2,708,000 people, to which Berch added 342,000 (to account for those who lived in the cities) and de-

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ducted 60,000 (to account for widows). The final number for the population of Sweden was thus 2,990,000. This was roughly one-third more than the actual figure (which was around 2,200,000), and it was well received by the authorities, who liked optimistic estimates of the size of the population. They were also very happy with Berch’s prognosis that if Sweden used its resources well, it could house more than eight times this number, or 24,000,000 people. The optimism about the potential wealth of the Swedish household that comes through in the figures of Berch was by no means unique, but rather part of a general attitude among Swedish scientists, civil servants, and the educated elite. This can be illustrated by the responses that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences received to its announcement in the early 1760s of a prize for the best answer to the following question: “What are the advantages and disadvantages of Sweden’s climate, compared to other countries, with reference to its public household as well as its individual households?” Most of the participants were convinced that Sweden had been blessed by the Lord and that its lucky inhabitants lived in the best of all possible worlds. Several of the contestants agreed, for example, that the strong sun in southern countries was a nuisance, while the snow of Sweden was a blessing since it made the nights bright and protected the earth from the cold. Sweden was enormously rich and it could very well manage without the kind of resources that other countries had. As an example of this latter argument, one may cite the following statement: “I find even less ground for our complaint [in Sweden] about the lack of elephants, camels and other animals and birds. We have a surplus of all the animals we need, both tame and wild, both forest and seabirds. If someone seriously tried to make our elks tame, they would become our camels, and we would not need to feed them” (Högström 1766: 31). Another writer noted that in Sweden “we do not need to fear tigers, lions, leopards and elephants or warrior monkeys”; there is the occasional “bear or wolf ”—but that is all. Similarly, Swedes “do not need to fear sharks; we only have peaceful fishes” (Gadd 1764: 44). And “while no one in Egypt dares to go out between 12 o’clock and 4 in the afternoon, for fear of getting their feet burned; and while the natives of the island of Ormus [Hormuz] have to lie half the day in waterholes, to avoid being devoured by the burning heat of the sun, we can always travel in comfort and go about other tasks in good spirits and with healthy bodies” (47). The discussion of Sweden’s population during the eighteenth century was similarly characterized by an element of wild optimism and hope. I

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have already mentioned Berch’s estimate that Sweden could hold a population of twenty-four million, and he was not alone in suggestion such a high number. Other estimates were twenty-six, twenty-nine, and thirty million (Johannisson 1988: 112). Today, by comparison, the Swedish population is ten million, and that of Finland is five and a half million. Mercantilism in its Swedish version was also obsessed with counting everything and reducing everything to a number; and there was also a strangely utopian element to the whole thing. As an example of this trend, we can mention Jacob Faggot, who was the head of the Land Survey Board and in 1741 published a booklet entitled Thoughts on the Knowledge and Description of One’s Country ([1741] 1743). Faggot encouraged his countrymen to explore every nook and cranny of the kingdom and to send their reports to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Maps and engravings were helpful in this enterprise, he added, and should accompany the reports. Faggot also carefully enumerated each type of resource that should be investigated and counted: rivers, brooks, lakes, mills, types of animals, types of handicraft, types of buildings, and much more. Faggot’s appeal for a general geographic and economic inventory of the country was very successful, and reports soon poured into the academy. Many of these drew on political arithmetic along the lines of Petty, including the famous description of Lajhala parish by E. O. Runeberg, which became a model that many followed (Runeberg 1758, 1759). Every inhabitant, every piece of land, and every object in this parish were carefully investigated, described, and counted by Runeberg, who also calculated their value down to the last penny. He emphasized that while 1,800 people lived in Lajhala in 1750, there was room for more than fifteen times that number, or 28,000 people. Runeberg finally made an attempt to calculate which of the members of the population (“ humans”) had an economic value to the country (“workers”). A woman, for example, counted as three-quarters of a man in this respect. According to Runeberg’s calculations, 40 percent of the population could be classified as “workers.” Most authors who have commented on the attempt in Sweden to make an inventory of the country’s resources with the help of political arithmetic have noted the hope and enthusiasm that often characterized this enterprise. Karin Johannisson, as already mentioned, refers to it as a form of “wild and somewhat crazy optimism” (Johannisson 1988: 111). The Swedish state, she also notes, was originally very interested in the production of an inventory of the country with the help of political arithmetic; and the main reason for

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this was that it wanted to command more resources in order to reassume its place as a great European power. As part of this effort, it strongly encouraged the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to pursue this task. In 1748 it also created a special office, the Office of Tables (Tabellverket), which had as its primary task the collection of information about the resources of the country. When this office started to produce reports, these were read with great interest by the political elite. All material of this type was also secret, since it was impor tant that the enemies of Sweden did not find out how strong the country was. The task of the Office of Tables was facilitated by the fact that the Swedish clergy had a legal obligation (since 1686) to document every single birth, death, baptism, and marriage in the country. Since each person who was born in Sweden was automatically also a member of the Lutheran church, this meant that the church had information on practically every person in the country. The figures that the clergy collected at a local level were sent to the Office of Tables in Stockholm, where they were added up and assembled into tables. These were then rushed to the power ful Secret Committee of Congress (sekreta utskottet), where they were studied with much interest, in the hope that they would show that Sweden had plenty of resources to draw on. Thanks to the information of the clergy, the Office of Tables produced very reliable information; and after a while the Swedish politicians realized that Sweden in reality had a rather small population: 2.2 million. Other information helped to puncture other aspects of the dream that Sweden was a wealthy country, and after a while Congress lost interest in the Office of Tables and its calculations of the population. The Office of Tables was not abolished—it was understood that it produced reliable information about the country’s population—but it no longer attracted the attention and hope that it once had.

Project #2: The Hopeful Activities Regarding the Swedish Economy by Carl von Linné The second example I will use to illustrate the role of hope in the Swedish economy during the eighteenth century involves Carl von Linné (1707–78) and his work. While Linné is primarily known as a botanist and for his

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classification of flowers, he also considered himself an economist, and it is mainly in this latter capacity that he is of interest in this chapter. It should also be emphasized that Linné saw his scientific work as part of a divinely inspired economy in a way that was popular at the time in Sweden. It is also at precisely this point that hope enters into the picture; and, according to the foremost authority on Linnean economics, Linné’s ideas on economics were heavily infused by a kind of “Candidean” optimism (Koerner 1999: 102, 152). As will soon be shown, this optimism also came to be expressed in a number of institutional ways, since Linné was one of the country’s most celebrated scientists and had plenty of resources at his disposal. The fact that Linné’s economic ideas were deeply influenced by religion makes it necessary to say something about the role of religion in eighteenthcentury Swedish society and especially among its scientists. At this point in time Sweden was still a deeply religious country, and the Swedish church was vigilant in its role as the guardian of general morality as well as Lutheran orthodoxy. It nonetheless approved of the Christian doctrine known as physicotheology, which had emerged in the late seventeenth century in England and soon spread to Sweden. The basic theme of this doctrine was that science and Christianity are closely connected: to study nature is a way to honor God, by showing the glory of his creation. Physicotheology has its name from the title of a book by William Derham that appeared in 1713 and became immensely popular (Derham [1713] 1773). Physico-Theology was translated into Swedish in 1736, and one of its readers was Linné, who eventually became the foremost representative of this type of religion in Sweden. According to Derham, God had created the world according to a master plan, and everything in it—every plant, every bird, every human being, and so on—had a predetermined place. The exact place that something occupied in this divine and static order was not immediately clear to humans, but if they worked diligently they might find it. In this way, they would also get to know the purpose of every thing, since nothing existed without a purpose. The air, for example, was necessary for respiration, Derham explained, just as the wind was necessary for navigation. Without soil, plants could not grow; and without trees, people could not make tools or buildings. The earth, in brief, was a magnificent mirror of the glory of God; and it was man’s task to explore the earth and use it for the purposes that God had invested it with. Linné, who originally had wanted to become a clergyman like his father, was a deeply religious man. He saw his own work in natural history, including botany, as a response to a task created by God. It was his true vocation to

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explore nature, and in this way make it possible for other Swedes to make use of its many fruits. As a scientist, Linné is best known for having introduced a new system of classification into botany, the so-called sexual system, based on the structure and number of stamens and pistils. It is often noted than in creating this system, Linné brought order into botany, since his system of classification was simple and effective. Every plant was essentially given a name according to a binominal nomenclature. By looking at a few parts of the flower, the observer could easily identify it, a bit like a person today is identified through family name and first name. It is also often argued that Linné was satisfied with just naming plants, and that he paid little attention to more substantial issues such as plant anatomy, plant physiognomy, and experiments. It is sometimes even argued that, properly speaking, Linné did not make one truly scientific discovery (see, e.g., Lindroth 1983: 34). While this type of criticism is essentially correct, there is more to Linné’s classifications than simply a desire to supply labels and a superficial approach to science. Linné’s attraction to the exercise of naming plants was closely related to his religious worldview; and to name something, from this perspective, meant first of all to establish its correct place in the order of God. It essentially meant an attempt to bring order into what might at first seem chaos, but which in reality constituted an order that man had been set to explore. As Linné famously put it, “I saw the never-ending, all-knowing, and all-powerful God’s back where he walked, and I was astounded! I traced his footstep over the fields of nature and saw in each one, even in those I could barely see, an unending wisdom and power” (quoted in Rausing 2003: 189). Linné did not think that his classification directly traced the divine order of nature, but he never stopped hoping that he one day would find the key to the order of God’s creation. He was also convinced that till this was done, his classification represented the best alternative. While posterity only remembers Linné’s work in botany, he himself was interested in all of nature—in each of its three kingdoms: plants, animals, and stones. Linné was sure that all of nature had been created in God’s mirror and  that every thing had an exact place that it was his task to discover. “Oeconomia naturae,” as he wrote in a booklet with this title, “is nothing but the great Creator’s wise arrangement of natural objects on our earth, thanks to which they are capable of having the purpose for which they were created” (Linné [1749] 1906: 5).

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Linné’s ideas on economics were closely interwoven with his ideas on religion and nature. God had created nature, and the first and foremost task of economics was to make an inventory of nature so that man could use plants, animals, and so on in the way that God had intended. In a pamphlet called The Foundation of the Economy, Through Knowledge of Nature and Physics (1740) Linné noted that “there is no science in the world that is higher, more important than oeconomy, since all of man’s welfare rests on it; hence this science needs to be improved and studied carefully” (Linné 1740: 406). Linné said that he realized that there was a science known as cameralism that mainly dealt with the economy and the state, but he still insisted that economics could be defined as “the science that teaches us how to survive by using the different forms of nature, as based on the elements.” As a science, he continued, economics rests on “two pillars”: “physics and knowledge of nature.” “Since the object of economics is knowledge of nature,” this meant that one also has to have some knowledge of the three kingdoms of nature (ibid.). Oeconomia mineralium, Linné says, supplies us with knowledge about stones, to be used, for example, in metallurgy. The knowledge of Oeconomia animalium is useful for such activities as fishing, hunting, and the raising of cattle. And Oeconomia vegetabilium provides us with useful knowledge of plants. While the foundation of Linné’s view of economics was religious along the lines of physicotheology, he also shared many of the views of the mercantilists. Though he never became a member of the political party in Sweden that identified the strongest with mercantilist ideas, the Hats, he moved in their circles and shared their ideas. He wanted Sweden to have a positive balance of trade, and he agreed that the most important way to go about this was to encourage the creation of manufactories, and in this way put an end to the import of luxuries and other items that could be produced in the country equally well. In reality Linné went further than this and developed his own primitive version of cameralism (Koerner 1999). He was, for example, against all foreign trade and wanted Sweden to be totally self-supporting. He was deeply suspicious of paper money and preferred precious metals, especially gold. His economic ideal was static in nature, and he had no concept of economic growth. This last point can be illustrated by the following quote from Lisbet Koerner’s important study Linnaeus: Nature and Nation: “His understanding of economic ‘improvement’ was confined to a qualitative elaboration of this living world which he inhibited. He wanted to perfect, not to break, what

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he saw as a God-ordained link between nature and man. In his projected future, shoes would be stuffed with cotton grass, pillows fi lled with eiderdown, and cloth woven from buffalo wool and dyed with tropical insects. He hoped to ride elks, write with swan feathers, and read by the light of seal-fat lamp” (Koerner 1999: 111). According to Heckscher, Linné had no sense whatsoever of economic realities (1942b: 5). What mattered to Linné was first of all to find out what purposes God had invested nature with and then, by using nature in the right way, produce well-being in the population. People often starved in Sweden, Linné noted, but once they understood that they could eat many of the plants that existed all around them in nature, things would improve. While Linné’s ideas on economics may seem peculiarly abstract and far from reality when they are presented in a summary way as I have done here, this is only part of the story. Linné also tried to translate his economic ideas into practice in a number of ways, and it is to this topic—how Linné set about realizing his hope for a wealthy and self-supporting Sweden—that I now shall turn. He primarily did this in three ways. He tried to spread his ideas on the proper management of the Swedish household by initiating professorships in economics. By traveling around in Sweden, he also attempted to make an inventory of the country’s economic resources so that Swedes could live better. And, finally, he sent some of his students abroad, with the task of bringing back plants to Sweden that were useful but currently had to be imported. While the decision to institute the first professorship in economics in Sweden was taken by the estates, it was Linné who was the driving force behind the next three professorships, and he also succeeded in having his own students appointed to all of them (see, e.g., Heckscher 1942a). Linné’s ideas of what a professorship in economics should be about can be distinguished from cameralism as well as mercantilism first and foremost by the heavy emphasis that he placed on knowledge of nature, including botany. The professor of the chair in economics that was instituted in 1759 in Uppsala should, for example, according to the instructions, live on an experimental farm that was also to be used in the education of the students. The lectures were to consist of a mixture of natural history, manufacturing techniques, and agricultural information. Linné also undertook a series of “scientific trips” through Sweden with the purpose of making an inventory of the country’s resources (see, e.g., Linné [1741] 1908; Heckscher 1942b). Most of these trips had been decided

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on by the estates, which not only financed them but also provided Linné with detailed instructions on what to look for during his travels. First and foremost, he should be on the lookout for what could ensure the success of the manufactories, and in this way help to reduce the imports that were draining the country of precious metals. Linné was told, for example, to look for clay that could be used for porcelain, for plants that could be used for medicinal purposes, and for plants that could be used to dye textiles. It was also important to carefully cata log all plants, animals, and stones. Linné’s reports from these trips have become part of the literary heritage of Sweden, and many of them are still read today. In fresh and unceremonious language Linné not only describes the general features of the geography and botany of the various landscapes of Sweden, but also comments on the habits of their inhabitants and makes many sharp-eyed observations. The trips allowed Linné to make an inventory of nearly all of Sweden; for example, in 1749 he published a work on how to use many of the wild plants in the country. In Flora Oeconomica or the Household Use of Plants in Sweden That Grow Wild, Linné described the uses of 1,137 wild plants, mentioning their medicinal use, which of them can be eaten, and so on. In the preface he says, “When I realized the great utility that plants can have in general, it saddened me that there was no inventory of them. . . . I thus realized what utility such an inventory would have for the household, my countrymen and my country” (Linné [1749] 1971: 4–5). In the preface to Flora Oeconomica Linné also says that “the all-knowing Creator has not put man’s resources in one place, but instead spread them all over the world, in the air, in the water and in the depth of the earth: thereby making it necessary for him to look for them everywhere they exist” (Linné [1749] 1971: 3). This is where Linné’s students come into the picture, or more precisely his project of sending his students all over the world to bring back plants and animals that could be used to make Sweden prosperous and also eliminate the need for importing such items as coffee, tobacco, rice, cotton, and so on. All in all, Linné sent nineteen of his favorite students all over the world during these “scientific trips,” as he called them—to Africa, India, China, the United States, and South America. One student accompanied Captain James Cook on his famous trip around the world in 1768–71, while others traveled on ships belonging to the Swedish East India Company or on any ship that would take them. The students were typically gone for very long stretches of time, and nearly half of them died during the trips.

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All the students—or “apostles,” as Linné called them—had been trained in natural history and given precise information about what to look for abroad. For example, Linné was obsessed with cultivating tea in Sweden; he made repeated efforts to have tea bushes brought to Sweden, and even tried to cultivate tea himself in Uppsala. He was also eager to start up silk production in Sweden, and soon, thanks to his students, there were large silk plantations in Stockholm and a few other places as well. The students also brought back huge collections of plants and various exotic objects and animals. All of this excited Linné enormously, and he wrote about one of his returning “apostles” that he awaited his arrival in Uppsala as eagerly as “a bride [longs] for one o’clock at night” (Lindroth 1983: 54–55). How successful was Linné’s enterprise of adding to Sweden’s wealth through his students in this manner? The general verdict is somewhere between “basically a failure” and “totally a failure” (see, e.g., Sörlin 1989: 106; Koerner 1999: 148, 163). Linné’s hope that many of the plants in foreign countries could thrive in Sweden turned out to be illusory. In his attempts to change the laws of botanical acclimatization, so to speak, Linné sometimes succeeded in keeping his imported plants alive for some time in his famous garden in Uppsala. Eventually, however, all died, victims of the cruel cold of the Swedish winter. His project to transfer plants from a mountainous region abroad to a mountainous region in Sweden, such as Lapland, also failed—as did his more general project of turning Lapland into a kind of “West Indies” of Scandinavia, with cedar and cinnamon groves and abundant plantations of saffron. The idea of creating a new type of economics, with a heavy element of botany and natural history, and spreading it through the country via the university, also led nowhere. In Lund, the chair in Linnaean economics was abolished a few years after Linné’s death, with the justification that the topic was better covered by the chair in “historia naturalis.” The other two chairs in economics that he had helped to create soon also reverted to a more traditional approach in economics.

Project #3: The Hope Associated with the Manufactories in Eighteenth-Century Sweden The most spectacular expression that hope took in the Swedish economy in the 1700s was the attempt by Congress and the Swedish state to create a powerful manufacturing industry. While the projects of political arithmetic

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and Linné’s economics had more to do with the ushering in of a new and hopeful way of looking at economic reality than with engaging in direct economic activity, it was different with the project of the manufactories. Indeed, Congress spent more money on the manufactories than on either agriculture (which constituted the main source of livelihood for some 80  percent of the population) or the iron industry (which represented Sweden’s most profitable export industry at the time). There were several motives behind the huge investments into the manufactories that Congress now undertook, and one of these was clearly related to mercantilist ideology. According to this way of looking at economic reality, the ideal was a state that could do without imports, a belief that often led to attempts by state elites in Europe to encourage domestic production that could replace what was being imported. But, according to Heckscher, whose work on the role of the manufactories in Swedish history still dominates the academic discussion of this issue, there was also one other important motive behind the enthusiasm and hope that Congress expressed on this issue (Heckscher 1937, 1949, 1954). This was the idea that Sweden, for the first time in its history, would be able to produce a type of goods that had never before been produced in the country; and this was especially true for high-quality, finished goods. This primarily meant sugar, porcelain, and various types of high-quality textiles, such as fine wool, silk, and cotton. While this second motive, from today’s perspective, can easily be interpreted as a desire to modernize and industrialize Sweden, there exist impor tant differences between the manufactories and the type of establishments that came with industrialism. The manufactories essentially belonged to the type of industry that existed before modern industry. Their activities differed from the ones associated with modern industry in at least two ways: they did not take place in factories, and they were not fi nanced in the same way as modern enterprises. Furthermore, in Sweden the term manufakturer came to be primarily identified with one very specific type of goods: finished goods that had been produced with the explicit purpose of replacing imported goods. A few of these finished goods were, of course, also produced by the peasants (hemslöjd), but their products were seen by contemporaries as belonging to a category different from that of manufactured goods, which were only produced in the cities and in accordance with special legislation. Finally, as opposed to the situation in many other countries in Europe, all Swedish manufactories were privately owned. The Swedish state made no attempts it-

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self to undertake the production of, say, silk, as the German states did. Even when Linné sold the potentially lucrative invention of a method for cultivating pearls in the Swedish rivers to the estates, these quickly sold them on to a businessman. While a few manufactories had been created already in the 1600s in Sweden, these were insignificant compared to the ones that were created in the 1700s, especially during the period from the 1720s to the 1760s, when the party of the promercantilist Hats was in power. The support that the Hats gave to the manufactories came in a wide variety of forms. For example, the import of certain products was forbidden, and no one except for the manufactories was allowed to develop import substitutes. Sometimes competition between individual manufactories was forbidden as well, again with the purpose of ensuring that no energy was wasted in the battle to replace imports. First and foremost, however, support was given in the form of money. Liquid means either were handed out directly or took the form of loans and rebates. The manufactories were also allowed to borrow, using finished products or raw materials as security. If there was an interest at all on the loans, it was often minimal; it was also common for the state to relieve the manufactories of their obligation to repay the loans. One of the manufactories received more money than all of the others together, and this was the Manufacturing Works of Alingsås, which throughout its existence was held up as a model by Congress for the other manufactories to emulate. Th is corporation had been created by Jonas Alströmer (1685– 1761), a Swedish businessman who had made his fortune as a merchant in England and then returned home because of his vision that Sweden must create a textile industry of its own (see, e.g., Heckscher 1917, 1918). The charismatic Alströmer quickly got Congress interested in his plans and was soon viewed as the very embodiment of the hope in Sweden to create a successful manufacturing industry. In reality Alströmer had few talents as a leader of manufactories, and he had little interest in their practical side. He was, however, a very persuasive man and spent much of his time in Stockholm, where he worked behind the scenes to ensure that the subsidies kept flowing to his creation in Alingsås. The Manufacturing Works of Alingsås kept some 1,500 workers occupied in a huge number of tasks, primarily textile production but also the production of tobacco, needles, buttons, pipes, gold objects, and much more. It should be added that the production was not standardized and that often

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only a small number of items were produced, typically for friends and personal acquaintances of Alströmer. One of Alströmer’s many pet projects was to import a new type of sheep into Sweden that could produce fine-quality wool. He also made an attempt to introduce the potato on a large scale into the country. The Manufacturing Works of Alingsås was considered so impor tant by the authorities in Stockholm that Alströmer himself was assigned full legal and political power over the city of Alingsås. He was also a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a friend of many of the most important scientists of the time, such as Polhem and Linné. During one of his trips through Sweden, Linné visited Alingsås and was delighted by what he saw. He praised Alströmer and summarized his impressions in one of his traveling accounts, Västgöta Resa ([1746] 1940), as follows: If you have not been there yourself, you can never imagine what it is like. Here you can see how far a person can go who uses his ideas in a wise manner and who in addition has a burning desire to serve the general public; a person of this type can often accomplish more than a thousand persons without ambition. Before Mr. Alströmer’s time, the manufactories were in deep darkness in most of our country, but now they produce cloth and food for many thousands. Most of the workers at Alingsås are Swedes, who have learned from artisans who come from abroad, so that most of the manufactories are run by our own countrymen, who now know how to produce as lovely textiles and clothes, with Swedish hands in Sweden, as any that are produced in other nations. (129) While the Manufacturing Works of Alingsås was the flagship of the Swedish manufactories, there were also others. These were all situated in cities, following the tradition in the Middle Ages of assigning certain activities to the cities and forbidding them in the countryside. Most of the manufactories were situated in Stockholm, where one could also find half of all the workers who worked in this type of enterprise. Two-thirds of every thing that was produced in the manufactories was produced in Stockholm. The nextlargest city with manufactories was Norrköping, followed by Alingsås. The three main products that were produced in the manufactories were textiles, sugar, and tobacco. In textiles, which was by far the most important of these, wool predominated. The production of silk was considerable; the

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main reason for this was that the estates were fascinated by the prospect of producing such an exotic material in Sweden. The estates were also very interested in the dying of textiles, and they heavily subsidized attempts to develop this type of capacity in the country. The production of sugar was based on sugar cane (which cannot be grown in Europe) and took place in special refineries. There was also small-scale production of glass, porcelain, tobacco pipes, mirrors, and paper in the manufactories. The number of workers employed in the manufactories was thirteen thousand to fourteen thousand at first and then rose to sixteen thousand to seventeen thousand during the peak of the 1700s (Heckscher 1949: 610). Altogether this amounted to about 1  percent of the Swedish population. Most of the workers were women who worked on a part-time basis, often in the home. Since some types of spinning also took place in poorhouses, prisons, and similar institutions, the line between forced labor and work in the manufactories was blurred. In his report of what he saw in Alingsås, Linné noted, for example, that “there are no beggars here since they are put into the manufactories when they arrive” (Linné [1746] 1940: 117). It was also common for the workers to run away from the manufactories. According to mercantilist ideology, everybody in the population should work, and wages must be kept low or the country would not prosper. How successful was the project of Congress (and especially the Hats) to jumpstart the production of formerly imported goods through the manufactories? On the whole, the answer is that it was not successful at all. Most of what was produced was of low quality and could not be sold at a profit, either domestically or abroad. The little that was sold on export was heavily subsidized. There appears to have been many reasons for the poor quality of what was produced in the Swedish manufactories. One was that the workers lacked the skills that were needed to turn out high-quality goods. The level of skill in France, for example, where an important luxury industry had existed since the 1600s, was much higher. Another reason was the lack of economic sense among the leaders of the manufactories. They were largely inspired by the notion that they were producing something that had never before been produced in Sweden, but they had little practical experience in overseeing production and making a profit. They soon also discovered that at every step of the way they could be subsidized by Congress; this meant that many enterprises were allowed to stay in business even if the goods they produced were of inferior quality and could not be sold.

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When some of the most wasteful forms of support for the manufactories were eliminated in 1765–66, the Manufacturing Works of Alingsås immediately collapsed, and the industry suffered heavily. The difficulties were also accentuated by the general economic crisis that was going on at the time. The silk industry disappeared for good in the 1800s, and in the long run few of the manufactories survived. Exactly how few is a debated question in Swedish historiography, with Heckscher arguing that the manufactories mostly disappeared, while some contemporary economic historians argue that more manufactories survived than Heckscher was aware of (see, e.g., Heckscher 1954: 185–86, 207–8; cf. Nyström 1955; Krantz 1976). What is true in any case is that the manufactories did not live up to the great hopes that Congress and the Hats had invested in them, namely to make Sweden into a rich and wealthy household.

Concluding Discussion On his trip through Sweden in 1799, Thomas Malthus quickly realized that the country was very poor (Malthus [1803] 1989: 159). The peasants, as he notes in An Essay on the Principle of Population, had to mix bark into their bread, a traditional way of staving off starvation. In his description of Sweden Malthus also used statistics prepared by the Office of Tables. The number of Swedes, he says, was 3,043,731 in 1799, up from 2,229,661 in 1751. To Malthus this represented a dangerous development. Whether Malthus was right or wrong in his theory that a growing population represents a threat to a country rather than a source of richness, as the mercantilists had thought, it is clear that the Sweden that Malthus saw and the one that had been envisioned by some hopeful Swedes in the 1700s were two very different countries. By the 1790s, it was also clear that most of the dreams that had fired the imaginations of the hopeful mercantilists in Sweden had failed. Malthus does not refer to the wild speculations of the political arithmeticians, but he would no doubt have shuddered if he had heard about their hopes for a population of some twenty million to thirty million people in Sweden. By the time of Malthus’ visit, the dreams of Linné and his disciples to make Sweden into a kind of earthly paradise had all been abandoned. Coffee, tea, and many other plants that were brought from southern countries had not survived, and the elks were still wild. The project of a grandiose

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manufacturing industry had also crashed, even if some of the manufactories were still in existence in the 1790s. The Sweden that Malthus visited was poor and miserable, not rich and full of prosperous people as Linné and others had hoped it would be. This, however, does not mean that the mercantilist-utopian projects left no traces. Acts often have unintended consequences, and this was also true for these projects. One might, for example, think that even if the manufactories failed, they might have helped to set off the industrialization of Sweden that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. This, however, does not seem to have been the case; and when industrialization did come to the country, it was concentrated in three economic sectors that had no links whatsoever to the manufactories of the mercantilists (the iron industry, the forest industry, and the machine industry). Two unpredictable chains of events that were set off by the mercantilistutopian projects did, however, result in something important and valuable being produced in Sweden. The first of these had to do with the collection of facts about the Swedish population, with the help of political arithmetic, and the second with the effort to end the import of grain into the country. It was earlier mentioned that the Swedish Congress was very interested in having a big population, and that it was disappointed when the figures it received from the Office of Tables conclusively showed that the population of the country was quite small. What accounted for the great accuracy of the results from the Office of Tables was that Sweden, as chance would have it, did have access to exact figures on how many people lived in the country. The upshot of the whole thing was that the Office of Tables, under the leadership of Wargentin, was in a position to set political arithmetic to the side and introduce a new and very reliable type of statistics. Instead of continuing to make a mercantilistic type of inventory, the Office of Tables increasingly began to view its task as simply gathering statistics on the population. As Johannisson has emphasized in The Measurable Society: Statistics and the Dreams of Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe, the famous Swedish population statistics had originally been put together as part of the grandiose project of exploring Swedish wealth with the help of political arithmetic. But the project then shrunk to the more modest task of simply gathering data on when people were born and when they died (Johannisson 1988: 174–79). The second chain of unpredictable events that was set off by a mercantilistutopian project and that led to something useful involved the potato. During

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the 1700s the Swedish authorities were worried about the expensive imports of grain and looked around for possible substitutes (see, e.g., Heckscher 1954: 154–57). One such alternative was the potato, which until then had only been known in the country as a kind of exotic curiosity. Especially the colorful Alströmer took an interest in it and tried to launch it on a big scale. But the peasants remained suspicious and refused to try out the new crop. In 1748, however, Countess Eva de la Gardie submitted a paper to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in which she showed that the potato could be used not only for food but also to produce powder, food for cattle—and alcohol. The Board of Commerce (Kommerskollegium) soon spread the good news among the population that the potato could be used to produce alcohol. That people would get drunk was something the state did not care about, especially since the use of the potato would lessen the demand for imported grain (which was often used for this very purpose). The insight that the potato could be used to make alcohol broke down the resistance to its use among the peasants, who as time went on also began to use it as food. Since then, the potato has become an integral part of the diet of the average Swede. In brief, from the mercantilist-utopian hopes in the 1700s, at least two very useful items were produced that today are part of Swedish society: Statistiska Centralbyrån (as the Office of Tables has been known since 1858) and a new and healthy staple—the potato.

Note 1. Unless other wise stated, when the source in this chapter is in Swedish and the quote is in English, the translation is my own.

References Derham, William. (1713) 1773. Physico-Theology: or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation. A new edition. Edinburgh: John Gray. Faggot, Jacob. (1741) 1743. “Tankar om Fäderneslandets Känning och beskrifwande.” In Kungliga Vetenskapsakademiens Handlingar, 2:1–28. Stockholm: Grefi ng. Gadd, Pehr Adrian. 1764. Svar på Frågan, Hvilka äro Svenska Climatets förmåner och olägenheter, i anseende til allmänna och enskilda Hushållningen, i jämförelse med andra Länder. Stockholm: Lars Salvius.

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Heckscher, Eli. 1917. “Ett bidrag till Alingsås manufakturverks historia.” Historisk Tidskrift 37: 88–113. ———. 1918. “Alströmer, Jonas.” In Svenskt Biografiskt Lexikon, 1:556–64. Stockholm: Bonniers. ———. 1935. Mercantilism. 2 vols. London: Allen and Unwin. ———. 1937. “De svenska manufakturerna under 1700-talet.” Ekonomisk Tidskrift 39: 153–221. ———. 1942a. “Anders Berch och den Ekonomiska Vetenskapens Första Steg i Sverige.” Lychnos 7: 34–64. ———. 1942b. “Linnés Resor—Den Ekonomiska Bakgrunden.” Svenska LinnéSällskapets Årsskrift 25: 1–11. ———. 1949. Sveriges Ekonomiska Historia från Gustav Vasa: Det Moderna Sveriges Grundläggning. Vol. 2, pt. 2. Stockholm: Bonniers. ———. 1954. An Economic History of Sweden. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Högström, P. 1766. Svar på Kungliga Vetenskapsakademiens Fråga, Hvilka äro Svenska Climatets förmåner och olägenheter, i anseende til allmänna och enskilda Hushållningen, i jämförelse med andra Länder. Stockholm: Lars Salvius. Johannisson, Karin. 1988. Det Mätbara Samhället: Statistik och Samhällsdröm i 1700talets Europa. Stockholm: Nordstedts. ———. 1990. “Society in Numbers: The Debate over Quantification in 18th Century Political Economy.” In The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin Rider, 343–62. Berkeley: University of California Press. Karlsson, Per-Arne. 1992. “Hushållsideologi och mercantilism.” Historisk Tidskrift 112: 94–100. Koerner, Lisbet. 1999. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Krantz, Olle. 1976. “Production and Labour in the Swedish Manufactories During the 18th Century.” Economy and History 19: 27–48, 83–97. Lindroth, Sten. 1975. Svensk Lärdomshistoria: Stormaktstiden. Stockholm: Nordstedt and Söner. ———. 1983. “The Two Faces of Linnaeus.” In Linnaeus: The Man and His Work, ed. Tore Frängsmyr, 1–62. Berkeley: University of California Press. Linné, Carl von. 1740. “Doctor Linnaei tankar om grunden til oeconomien genom naturkunnogheten och physique.” In Kungliga Vetenskapsakademiens Handlingar, 1:405–23. Stockholm: Joh. Laur. Horrn. ———. (1741) 1908. “Om nödvändigheten af forskningsresor inom fäderneslandet.” In Skrifter, 2:65–88. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wicksell. ———. (1746) 1940. Västgöta Resa 1746. Malmö: Malmö Ljustrycksanstalt. ———. (1749) 1906. Oeconomia Naturae. In Skrifter, 2:1–64. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wicksell.

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———. (1749) 1971. Flora Oeconomica eller Hushålls-Nyttan af de i Swerige Wildt Wäxande Őrter. Stockholm: Beckmans Tryckerier. Magnusson, Lars. 1991. “Hushållsideologi och järnproduktionens begränsning under frihetstiden.” Historisk Tidskrift 111: 450–58. ———. 1996. Sveriges Ekonomiska Historia. Stockholm: Tiden. Mahiev, François. 1998. William Petty. Paris: Economica. Malthus, Thomas R. (1803) 1989. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nyström, Per. 1955. Stadsindustrins arbetare före 1800-talet. Stockholm: Tiden. Petty, William. 1899. The Economic Writings. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rausing, Lisbet. 2003. “Underwriting the Oeconomy: Linnaeus on Nature and Mind.” In Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, ed. Margaret Schabas and Neil De Marchi, 173–203. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Runeberg, E. O. 1758. “Beskrifning öfwer Lajhala Socken i Osterbotten.” In Kungliga Vetenskapsakademiens Handlingar, 19:108–62. Stockholm: Salvius. ———. 1759. “Försök til en politisk Värdering på Land och Folk, i anledning af Lajhala socken.” In Kungliga Vetenskapsakademiens Handlingar, 20:55–120. Stockholm: Salvius. Runefelt, Leif. 2001. Hushållningens Dygder: Affektlära, Hushållningslära och Ekonomiskt Tänkande under Svensk Stormaktstid. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wicksell. Sörlin, Sverker. 1989. “Scientific Travel—The Linnaean Tradition.” In Science in Sweden, ed. Tore Frängsmyr, 96–123. New York: Science History Publications. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 3

Hope Turned Upside Down: How the Prospects for a Communist Utopia Were Dashed in 1950s Romania Katherine Verdery

In his paper “From Sugar Canes to ‘Swords,’ ” Hirokazu Miyazaki (2005) distinguishes between “hope in the means,” which foregrounds a particular vehicle for accomplishing something (his example is the dynamics of gift giving), and “hope in an end,” which foregrounds a predetermined end state. The distinction can apply both to the horizons of people anthropologists study and to the analytic horizons of the anthropologists themselves. Arguing for more attention to hope in the means, Miyazaki concludes his paper with these words: “This hope in extending a means [gift giving] is hope in the act of hoping. It is precisely such hope that evaporates when an end dictates the means” (290). It was precisely this practice of the end dictating the means that characterized the type of society I have been studying for four decades: Sovietstyle socialism. This was a society built from the top down to realize a communist utopia, a desired end state whose achievement would justify any means used to reach it. True to Miyazaki’s prediction, however, the result was the gradual evaporation of hope and ultimately the collapse of these socialist regimes. In the wake of this collapse and the alienation and criticism that preceded it, there has been little interest in exploring the hope that mobilized movements of liberation pursued in the name of such utopian goals. Least of all have Soviet-type societies themselves lately been described in

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terms of hope— other than to point to the Bolshevik experiment as a betrayal of hope on a mammoth scale. Several of the papers in this volume indeed raise questions about whether the concept of hope is widely applicable across cases (see esp. Guyer’s chapter). In these remarks I will presume that it is, for two reasons: fi rst, the spread of the (Judeo-)Christian tradition, with its message of hope and its millenarian-messianic hopeful temporalities, into regions of present-day Romania as early as the fourth century c.e.; second, the roots of communist ideology in that same tradition. In other respects, however, my chapter departs from the mandate for this collection, which was to ask how people generate prospective momentum in their lives and to what extent this connects with hope in the economy, especially in the market. My case represents the reverse: the construction of hope in societies explicitly designed to minimize the market and to intertwine the notion of “the economy” with, and subordinate it to, politics. To ask how hope was kept alive in the socialist “economy” is to ask instead whether and how the political economy of socialism managed to create hope by other means, understood to be justified by the end: a utopia in which the hopes of all for a better and more meaningful life would be fulfilled. My chapter concerns the failure of that hope, with its implications for imagining futures—how we can continue to live if this particular future imagining of something better is not available. Our agenda for this volume also asks us to take seriously the notion of hope as not just an object of ethnographic investigation but also a method of obtaining knowledge. As Miyazaki puts it, “Hope as a subject of inquiry cannot, and should not, be separated from the hope that underlies such inquiry. In other words, the hope entailed in social scientific analyses is social scientists’ analytical resource for an investigation of the character of hope” (Introduction, this volume; original emphasis). This injunction carries special weight in the case of “actually existing” socialism, for many who researched it shared communism’s hoped-for utopian project at least to some degree. To elucidate its real-world shortcomings was therefore more than merely an analytical task: it represented the disappointment of the analysts’ hopes for more attractive life prospects—a disappointment that might obstruct their search for hope as an ethnographic object in their material. I will underscore this difficulty by using two different terms to refer to the kinds of society I discuss: “socialism” for the actually (or formerly) existing variety, and “communism” for the utopian project, as well as for the party and its cadres.

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In what follows, I will seek to discover some spaces of hope (Harvey 2000) in the early installation of socialism in Romania. I emphasize that these spaces are those I deduce, not those in which I find an explicit language of hope in my sources—sources from which the Romanian word for “hope,” speranţa, is largely missing. My examples come from a collaborative project on the collectivization of land in Romania in the 1950s.1 To find hope in this exercise, one must plumb the archives and use great caution in interpreting the interviews, for most of our respondents in the research had nothing good to say about any aspect of collectivization—understandably enough, in a country in which collective farms had been broken up as of 1991 and the land in them returned to the former owners, a clear sign of the bankruptcy of the Romanian communist experiment in its twentieth-century form. This fact aggravates the point made in the paragraph above, concerning the disappointed hopes of scholars working on socialist societies: the dispositions of our respondents in the present, disinclined as they are to ransack their memories for hopeful moments in the socialist past, impede the search for hope as an ethnographic object in that period. I understand hope as both an internal disposition that motivates and a prospective momentum, a directional potentiality. In this latter sense it implicates notions both of the person and of agency. I suggest that the communist movement sought to create that potentiality by harnessing people’s motivation and ambition, through fostering their hope in an end. In Romania, however, the methods used had the effect of subverting that potential and discouraging or redirecting motivation and ambition. During the socialist period, that outcome was accompanied by subduing time’s lineality and directionality and evacuating agency from senses of the person. These general results differed by social group (see also Swedberg, “A Sociolog ical Approach to Hope in the Economy,” this volume), thereby stratifying hope in inverse relation to original social status. I will discuss the hopes of three social groups: local cadres (formed especially from the “ humble” peasantry or workers), poor peasants, and richer peasants, known as chiaburi (pronounced “kya BOOR,” Romania’s version of the Soviet kulaks).2 I begin with a brief outline of the collectivization process, and then examine three specific sites at which we can see efforts to create prospective momentum, all of them rooted in collectivization as the party’s hope for industrializing the country and controlling the food supply toward that end. They are “persuasion techniques” that cadres employed to compel peasants into the collectives, the fomenting of class warfare to influence people

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to enter the collectives early—chiefly the poor and dispossessed, who might see in communism their hope for a better life—and the petition-writing strategies of the persecuted “rich peasants,” as they sought to avoid being categorized as chiaburi, which would make their lives utterly miserable.

Romanian Collectivization: Brief Background By 1948, and with the essential support of the Soviet army, the Romanian Communist Party had established a firm hold on power. Although its leaders had some doubts about the wisdom of collectivizing land on the Soviet model, the Soviets’ determination to push for the policy throughout Eastern Europe was confirmed when the Cominform conference of 1948 voted for full collectivization in its member states. Th is led Romania’s communists to initiate collective farms; the decision was announced at a plenary session of the Central Committee in March 1949. The decision would end the economic and political independence of the large majority of Romania’s population, over 75 percent of whom lived in villages at the time. It would involve by far the most massive exercise of force against the peasantry in Romania’s modern history. The extent to which the peasantry represented—as many Romanians believed—the repository of the national identity would also be placed in question (see Negrici 2005). Notwithstanding significant differences between Romanian and Soviet rural life, the model employed would be the Soviet one, with some minor variations. In discussing how collectivization proceeded, we must distinguish between state and collective farms, for the process of their formation as well as their functioning were very different (see Verdery 2003: 52–55). The basis for creating state farms (at first called Gospodării Agricole de Stat, or GASs) was laid as early as 1945, when an agrarian reform took place in which the state began to acquire land by confiscating and nationalizing the property of “enemies of the people” and of large landlords. The state farms were generally formed on large blocks of expropriated land and were regarded as the property of “the whole people.” By contrast, collectives (known at first as Gospodării Agricole Colective, or GACs) consisted of tiny parcels of land that were not confiscated but “voluntarily donated” by villagers to form a common fund, of which they (rather than “the whole people”) were jointly the proprietors. Land might be moved back and forth between collective and state farms throughout the socialist period, and as the collectives were being

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formed the land of one or another individual household might end up in a state rather than a collective farm. My discussion here concerns primarily the process of forming the latter type: how farming households were compelled to “donate” their land to collectives and to become its labor force, forming GACs. As initially established by the party, a GAC should be created through the “ free consent” of people signing their land over to common ownership and management. The leaders held the principle of free consent to be crucial, as it had been to Lenin, and throughout Romania’s collectivization campaign there was frequent reference to the question of whether the principle of free consent was being trampled (as it often was). The work of cadres— “clarification” or “explanation” or “persuasion work,” as it was known (muncă de lămurire)—was to persuade peasants to give over their land to collective ownership and management. In approving the formation of new GACs, the party hoped that each family would bring at least three hectares of good land, as well as whatever agricultural implements it had; the farm management would then consolidate the various parcels by forming a compact bloc and exchanging land in it that belonged to nonmembers for parcels outside it. The collectivization drive proceeded in fits and starts throughout the 1950s, being pursued intensely in 1951–52, then relaxing after Stalin’s death in 1953, and fi nally resuming with full force in 1957 until it was declared complete in 1962. At every step cadres encountered peasants hostile to the idea of collectivizing who mounted often fierce resistance—the extent of which became apparent only with the opening of the party and Secret Police archives after 1989. Th is resistance is a sign of the most substantial hope of all the kinds I discuss here: the hope that the Americans would come—a subject of continual rumor throughout the 1950s—or that the party would give up the entire project of collectivizing. That was not, however, to be. By early 1962, regional and district party organizations were sending out teams of activists with instructions not to return home until they had signed people into GACs. Relentlessly blazing their way to full collectivization despite ongoing peasant opposition, the Romanian communists declared the campaign completed in April 1962, the last East Eu ropean country to do so. Officially, only 3.5  percent of arable land remained in private ownership, though in fact there were still many families who had not yet signed up. Rebellions continued on into 1963 and 1964, as peasants sought to withdraw from collectives they were not fi nding satisfactory.

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Techniques of Persuasion: The Hopes of Cadres In constructing socialism, the goal followed by the members united in the collective farm is, through well-organized work done together and using shared means of production, to assure our victory over the exploiters and enemies of the working people, to do away forever with the darkness and backwardness of small individual farms and to obtain instead the greatest production possible.3 The question of the hopes of Romanian party cadres is a complex one, for the number of committed party members before 1945 was very small. With Soviet help, they hoped to bring in a new and better social world, justifying the hopes of their Soviet mentors. As of that year, the numbers began to swell, bringing into the party not only some new converts but innumerable people who saw this as their best route out of persecution for their pre1945 fascist activities.4 How many of these shared the utopian hopes of the party’s founders cannot be determined; for the leaders, surely that hope in a radiant future was real—as well as the hope that they would manage to escape being purged by the Soviet authorities. For cadres lower down, I believe their main hope was of the latter kind: survival in a wholly unsettled and unpredictable political climate. That would require them to carry out (if not, indeed, to overexecute) the orders they received to get peasants into the GACs. These cadres employed a huge arsenal of techniques to try to entice people into joining the collectives. Presumably, some of them motivated their efforts with the hope of success; in addition, many of their techniques rested implicitly on manipulating hope. To begin with, cadres established model collectives, into which the state poured vast sums so as to equip them with tractors and other machinery and with chemical inputs to improve productivity. The idea was to have villagers see their fellows who had joined the collective going home at harvest time with much greater quantities of produce than those who had farmed alone and without such resources. If these models worked well, they would not only convince other households in the same community to join the collective: they would serve as examples to which peasants would be brought from communities often a considerable distance away. The highest form of this strategy was the busloads of Romanian peasants taken to view model collectives in the Soviet Union, whence they reportedly returned astonished at how wonderful life could be in a col-

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lective farm. For those who could not make one or another of this kind of trip, propaganda films were produced to show how life would be in the collectives, based on the model farms or on those in the Soviet Union. The strategy was a mimetic one: create a positive example, and others will want to imitate it, because the example will arouse their hope in a better life. Here, perhaps, was hope in the means. Yet the strategy, although initially successful (in 1949, those who joined collectives did so without the use of force), ultimately failed, in part because Romania’s communist government did not have the economic means to endow enough of these model farms with what they needed to produce superlative results. Moreover, cadres had great difficulty convincing people who had joined the collectives to actually work in them. Productivity stagnated, and people began trying to withdraw from their GACs. Setting up model collectives and taking people to visit them was one of several techniques employed toward a very important end: enabling villagers to imagine themselves into the communist future. Collectivization required a tremendous leap of the imagination for peasants who had spent their entire lives working parcels owned by individual households, and who had heard of nothing but this form of work from their ancestors (unless, of course, they were landless, in which case they and their kin would have worked fields belonging to someone else). In the archives we find repeated mention by cadres that villagers are hesitating to join, saying that they will “wait and see how things are going” before committing themselves—looking, we might surmise, for grounds for hope. The only people who had any notion as to what life in a collective farm might look like were those who had been taken prisoner in the Soviet Union during World War II. In contrast to the peasants taken to Potemkin collectives in the Soviet Union after 1948, their recollections were uniformly negative—so negative, in fact, that leaders of the Romanian party had loudly denied any plan to collectivize in Romania until they were well ensconced in power. Under these circumstances, mobilizing the idea of collectivization in ways that might attract adherents to the new collective forms was extraordinarily difficult. The problem cadres faced was how to create an imagining of the future that evoked hope. Daniel Puiu Lăţea has written persuasively of the vital necessity that cadres succeed in this task, and of their inability to do so—underscored by evidence of widespread resistance to collectivization. Many of our research collaborators found that interviewees had trouble detailing the arguments that cadres doing “persuasion work” had made to get them to join

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the collectives. Lăţea suggests that the reason was precisely that these arguments made no sense to people. The propaganda fi lms were completely unreal to their audiences, who assumed that the peasants shown in them were actors and the events had been made up, as with other kinds of theater. According to one of his respondents, “They showed us fi lms with collectives from Russia. . . . And we thought, ‘Good heavens! they made all this up!’ We didn’t think it was [real]” (Lăţea 2003: 64; see Kligman and Verdery 2011: 241). In the end, various forms of verbal and physical coercion proved more decisive in persuading people to donate their land to the collective farms than were these efforts at imagining the future. People coerced into a course of action are rarely motivated by hope for its successful outcome.

Class Warfare: The Hope of Poor Peasants One thing that both interviewees and archives agreed on was that the people who joined collective farms first tended to be the poor and landless peasants, who worked the land of others or were employed as servants. Here is one possible site for hope, already implicit in my discussion above: that by abandoning their wretched lives of poverty and joining the collective farm, they might collectively strive for better life chances. They had little to lose. In a display of nostalgia for the collective farm that was rare among our interviews, a formerly poor peasant I interviewed described how once the collective was formed, he and his wife had finally been able to build themselves a house and had sent their son to the military academy, whence he emerged an officer— something almost impossible for a poor peasant in presocialist times. This man’s hope, however, collided with the refusal of peasants owning land to join unless coerced: without substantial land reserves—which poor peasants by definition could not give—the collectives could not provide a decent livelihood for their members. One solution was to form collectives by confiscating land from wealthier peasants and landlords—people for whom owning land was the means for hope of a quite different kind, hope in their households’ prosperity. The loss of their land, and the persecutions to which they were exposed, dashed this kind of hope in the name of creating hope for groups of the previously disadvantaged. Here was hope turned upside down. The party called the technique essential to that process “fomenting class warfare” in the countryside, and I will discuss it at some length to illustrate the environment in which hope

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might have circulated. Fomenting class warfare was central to the party’s radical agenda of transforming both peasant social organization and the moral universe in which peasants lived. It was designed to support and promote those labeled poor peasants, and to demonize and discipline rich ones. To explain how this technique worked, I must briefly characterize what village life in Romania looked like as the communists came to power, in order to show its relation to the process of creating classes that would soon begin. Romania’s basic social units were the extended-family peasant household and the village community. Relations among households were based on social standing that was recognized in terms of both material wealth and symbolic and social attributes. Even though differences in the amounts of land owned might not be objectively large (ranging from 0 to 15 ha, for instance), the moral universe of these villages was not egalitarian; some people were more “visible” (văzuţi) than others. A variety of terms distinguished those holding greater and lesser status, beginning with the “wealthy” peasants, accorded high status in their communities based largely on their material and symbolic capital. Beneath them were “middle” peasants, and at the bottom the “poor” and “landless.” These categories had moral entailments: being rich was understood as a sign of virtue and hard work; being poor indicated a lack of character, laziness, or bad habits such as drinking—rather than, say, simple bad luck. Such qualities were thought to be inherited through the corporate family line. As Martha Lampland has shown for Hungary, a crucial ingredient in high status was having enough land to be able to control one’s own labor process and not have to work for others (1995: 35–46). The question of labor is particularly impor tant for the discussion to follow. Wealthy peasants generally had too much land to work with family labor alone; at peak periods they drew upon their kin and ritual kin. Indeed, they were socially defined by not working alone, by having the resources that enabled them to mobilize others; ritual kinship, which linked families of unequal means, was one common way of doing so. A couple with many ritual kin might call a work party and invite them (along with others of lesser means) to come and help with the harvest, after which all would be treated to food and drink. Precommunist villages, then, were hotbeds of status difference and status striving, based in the amount of land one disposed of, which grounded status categories of poor, middle, and wealthy peasants. These groupings are not usefully understood as “classes,” and even those considered wealthy might have only six or seven hectares; “status groups” seems the more apt

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characterization (see Jowitt 1978). In its attempt to collectivize, however, the party strove to create classes where they had not existed and then to turn members of these classes against one another. It created a new classification system consisting of three categories of peasants—poor, middle, and rich—that roughly paralleled the earlier referents of village social stratification, but with radically altered social meanings. Now, those with the highest status were supposed to be the poor. Rich peasants were now labeled chiaburi, meaning people who exploited the labor and lives of others. Party initiatives in virtually all domains of activity differentiated villagers according to these class assignments, privileging the poor and punishing the wealthy. The party’s work would consist of convincing the poorer and middle peasants to persecute and denounce the wealthy, humiliate them, and ultimately deprive them of the means of exploitation by taking away their land. A key feature the party used to distinguish chiaburi from poor and middle peasants was that they employed “salaried labor” for thirty days or more per year—that is, they worked with labor outside their immediate families—and/or owned impor tant means of production (a mill, a threshing machine, a tractor, a still). Since rich peasants had enough land to need the help of others in working it, the amount of land one owned often had something to do with acquiring chiabur status, though the correlation was not perfect. But more important is that rather than referring to actual characteristics of actual persons, the label “chiabur” was quintessentially a weapon. Like “enemy of the people,” of which it was a subset, it could be applied to villagers of many kinds. The point was for the party to create a category of people who could be made responsible for all manner of resistance (for example, pouring sand in threshing machines so they would not work, withholding grain, spreading pro-American propaganda) and then punish them, holding them up as negative examples for others. Although some people labeled chiaburi may have done the things or had the characteristics they were accused of doing or having, many (if not most) did not. The party claimed that the misdeeds of chiaburi were part of a battle in which these “exploiters” were trying to prevent the consolidation of a regime that favored the poor and oppressed. To end this oppression was the communists’ task—and the source of hope for the underprivileged members of the old society. Once specific people were labeled chiaburi, the trick was to mobilize others in the village against them. Cadres admonished “good” citizens to be vigilant in their search for saboteurs; anyone who attempted to thwart the

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regime’s progress was publicly denounced. Because in most cases these were people of high status who enjoyed the respect of their fellows and were the ritual kin of many of them, the party’s procedures included direct attacks on their status honor. Among these were measures designed to ridicule and humiliate them before other villagers (force them to push other people on wheelbarrows through the village or do demeaning forms of labor such as cleaning out toilets). Another tactic was to order chiaburi to plow under their just-harvested fields within twenty-four hours—impossible if you have more than a patch of land—and then jail them when they could not do so. In the local value system, spending time in jail was not something that wellrespected people did: jail was for criminals, gypsies, and ne’er-do-wells. The state imposed extremely high food requisitions that took so much from the chiaburi that they had to beg others for food or for money to buy their requisitions. This was not the behav ior of a man of high status. Cadres seeking to foment class warfare were manipulating the hope of the village poor—a group to which they sometimes belonged themselves. Poor peasants who had been sent to party schools reminisced with us about learning of class exploitation and class consciousness, then returning to their villages motivated to seek justice through promoting class warfare. They were glad that the communists had created schools and encouraged their education, equalizing life chances by penalizing the wealthy. Not all poor peasants we interviewed, however, reacted in this way: on the contrary. Many were the ritual kin of chiaburi and did not readily turn against them, or felt sorry for them and were moved by their plight (see Kideckel 1982).5 A poor peasant loyal to his ritual kin who were chiaburi might hide grain or flour for them, or risk bringing them food at night once their stocks had been depleted. Here we see the project of class warfare foundering on the rocks of long-standing social relations built on something other than class.

Dechiaburization: Hope for the Wealthy? The preceding section has illustrated the party’s devices for trying to turn a status order into a class structure so as to destroy the exploiting class. Did the people categorized as chiaburi have any way to defend themselves? Had they any sources of hope against the party’s continued persecution? They did, and these sources lay in the ill-defi ned category of “middle peasants,” whom the party considered potentially unreliable but not necessarily enemies of the

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people. Because so many factors entered into defining people as chiaburi—not just exploiting labor, but owning means of production, or being the object of someone’s grudge—the boundary separating chiaburi from middle peasants was unstable; therefore, the wealthy could try to have themselves reclassified as middle peasants. Party leaders actually encouraged this possibility, for they saw the “conversion” of middle peasants as essential to their project and wanted to be sure they had not mistakenly classified such families improperly, thus antagonizing their most impor tant social base. One window onto this process is the petitions for dechiaburization that they fi led during the 1950s. Shifts in policy within the party’s Central Committee facilitated this, providing room in some periods for people to remove themselves from chiabur status by fi ling contestations. Driving their hopes of success were the extortionary levels of taxation and requisitions suffered by those in the category of chiabur. For example, on May  11, 1953, the president of the people’s council of Orăştie district in Hunedoara County reported to regional authorities that alongside his 623 chiaburi for that year, he had 484 contestations, of which 422 had not yet been resolved.6 If there were 1,029 chiaburi in Orăştie district in 1952, in 1953 that number had fallen to 623 and in 1954 to 443.7 The changes partly reflected Stalin’s death, as well as struggles within the party over how to collectivize and how best to use chiaburi in doing so. Then, with the renewal of the collectivization campaign in 1956, we see more chiaburi being made (or remade) and more contestations. Sometimes a person would be dechiaburized, only to be rechiaburized a year or two later. A petition is quintessentially a hopeful form, and indeed a number of the ones I saw were signed with some such phrase as “In hopes of your favorable reply.” A chiabur contesting his status would send a petition to the commune or district office, sometimes with “letters of reference” from other villagers; there, it would provoke an inquiry, the district administration sending out a delegate to research the case and return to the district party authorities with a recommendation.8 From these fi les we can sometimes see how chiaburi were trying to negotiate their social status in response to the assault on it that cadres were making with their attempt to create classes. Here are two examples from Vlaicu, the village of my research. 1) The justification for classifying one man, G. I., as a chiabur in 1952 reads as follows: “Has a servant. Practiced commerce with animals and grain. Possesses 3.04 ha land.”9 G. I. fi led his contestation on September 29, 1952.10 He noted that he had less land than had been attributed to him (3.58

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ha instead of 6.35, he says—the numbers differ from one mention to another); that he had inherited most of it or received it as his wife’s dowry, and that he had received 1.5 ha in the land reform in 1945 for serving at the front— “precisely because I was not a wealthy man.” He argued that his parents were middle peasants who had worked the land on their own; that he never had any means of exploiting or a distillery that he might have commercialized, “as I have been mistakenly classified”; that he had sold only small amounts of produce for household needs, it being obvious that with only 3.58 ha he could not have much surplus produce; that he never did commerce with animals, as is obvious because he has had the same horned cattle since his marriage; that he did sell some bulls but only “from my own production, a fact that can be verified by examining the bills of sale”; that he had no house but rented his dwelling. He asked to have his situation verified and to be removed from the ranks of chiaburi. Alongside his contestation are five references from Vlăiceni, written in their own hand, all saying that they had known him since childhood and that he was a regular hardworking fellow who had always tilled his own land, except for a brief period in a factory or as day labor in the railway; that he received something in the 1945 reform; that his cattle were always well cared for; and that he raised beautiful bulls and allowed the people’s council to use them for hauling. The commune sent its own delegate to do research on-site, and they concurred, in almost the same words as G. I.’s own petition, as did the delegate who went to Vlaicu from Orăştie to research the case. On May 11, 1953, the district declared him “erased from the list of chiaburi.” 2) “L.A. Possesses at present 8.63 ha land. Had servants until 1948. Uses a salaried labor force for more than 30 days per year.”11 L. A. fi led his contestation on March 10, 1954,12 having been made chiabur in 1952, “it being affirmed that I had a servant until 1949 and that I didn’t work my 8 ha of land on my own.” He claimed that he had not had a servant since 1925, but that in 1948, his fellow villager, comrade P. I., insisted that without any obligation, he take in P. I.’s nephew from a large and poor family in a nearby mining town. “He stayed for five months in which time I bought him clothes and shoes out of the goodness of my heart, and he left very satisfied with the help I had given him. This help that I gave to someone needy was seized upon by some of my enemies who affirmed that I had help in working my land, that is, a servant.” He presented a list of thirty-two Vlăiceni (many of them his ritual kin) who would vouch that he had never had servants or exploited anyone. On April 28, 1954, the district delegate wrote a report recommending

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that he be removed from the list of chiaburi; two days later the president of the district council approved it. In these two files, people suffering persecution as class enemies mobilize hope for redress of their plight. Both men are at pains to show that they are not as important as they are made out to be: they have less land than they are charged with having, or some of it belongs not to them but to their wife, and they do not exploit anyone. L. A., in particular, had a lot of explaining to do: he was one of Vlaicu’s most influential men, from one of its most influential families. When I attended his funeral in 1973, nearly the whole village was there; people talked about how many villagers used to go to work his fields in “work parties,” how many ritual kin he had, and so on. Like the contestations of several others, his strove to explain why someone who appeared to be his servant really was not, and why people appearing to work for him were just exchanging work the way any normal peasant does. In their petitions, the status of “chiabur” became a kind of negotiation rather than an ineluctable fate. A successful petition was thus a means of sustaining hope. From documents like these we see the failure of the party’s efforts to create solidarity among poor and middle peasants against wealthy ones, whom they were supposed to expel from community life. The class struggle that chiaburization was to promote gave way, in many cases, to expressions of community solidarity with those labeled chiaburi, as fellow villagers supported them with favorable letters of reference.

Hope and Agency In the preceding sections I have shown how hope was differentially distributed across groups in rural society, as well as some of the means by which each group strove to realize it. Considering the means invites us to ask about agency: although hope as I have defined it does not require agents, the directional potentiality that resides in hope encourages us to ask how hope is fulfilled, as well as how it turns to despair, as a result of human action. In pushing collectivization, the party aimed to transform agency, uprooting it from smaller social units (households, kin groups) and rerooting it in larger ones, the membership of collective farms. Cadres achieved this in part by  transforming situations of autonomy and dependency in rural settlements. They took households that had been relatively autonomous and confiscated the bases for that autonomy, and they extracted poor peasants

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from their dependency on larger landowners, replacing it with dependency on the Communist Party. The poorer and middle peasants who chose to join the party or to work for it acquired agency of a kind not previously available to them: among other things, they could now denounce and thereby ruin their fellow villagers, calling in the state to settle old grudges. By contrast, households who chose not to work for the party lost some of their agency. These changes took place in the context of a rural value system that, as I have said, privileged agency in the form of controlling the conditions of one’s labor, fundamental to social personhood. Such control was part of exercising mastery over one’s land (see Verdery 2003: 177–79), a strong form of agency and the underpinnings of the hope for prosperity. In these ways, collectivization redistributed agency across social space. People who had had it lost it, people who had lacked it gained it in new forms, and rural social life began to gravitate toward collective forms of it. In the denunciations of poorer peasants we see evidence of their newly acquired agency, with the party as their ally. Those from whom agency was being drained, by contrast, engaged in frantic efforts to hold on to it, showing the resilience of the hope that propagates with the exercise of initiative. For example, dechiaburization petitions reveal the peasants’ inventiveness, as they tried numerous techniques for evading official categories—claiming that they owned less land than they were charged with having, dividing their land into several plots and attributing those to other family members, pointing out that their land was inherited or was the wife’s dowry (i.e., not purchased) and thus should not qualify them for chiabur status, and so on. We see in these documents people who think of themselves as having agency and as entitled to voice an opinion to the authorities, with whom they tried to establish a persuasive relationship, a means of hope. Paradoxically, their chances of success rested on their diminishing the evidence of the former agency-rich status that had once sustained their hopes for prosperity: now their only hope was to present themselves as not fulfilling the conditions for agency. An additional form indicating hope and agency was the conditions some people put on their entry petitions when they joined the collective—things like, “I wish to reserve the surface of 2.50 ha from the surface indicated above for my subsistence as I don’t have other sources of income until I can get a job. Once I get a job, I will deliver the rest of the land to the collective,” or “I wish my cart and oxen to be left in my use, to make bricks for my daughter’s house,” or “My petition is valid on the condition that my daughters retain

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their jobs and my son continue in school.”13 These conditions were part of a process of bargaining that peasants engaged in with cadres eager to sign them up. Their language counterbalanced the formalism of bureaucratic speech with alternative formulations, such as “I mention that . . . ,” “I reserve the right to . . . ,” “I obligate myself to . . . ,” as well as frequent use of subjunctive verbs—formulations that paid homage to the party’s wooden language while attempting to assert an individual’s agency nonetheless. Lăţea believes that these clauses were not in fact conditions but, rather, signs of the peasants’ skepticism toward local authorities; therefore they sought to legalize their concerns by noting down the concessions cadres appeared ready to make to get them into GACs (2009: 343–45). Alternatively, peasant skepticism might have reflected the most widespread form of hope in rural Romania: the hope that the Americans would come to liberate them, so communism would not last very long. As collectivization wore on, the main people exercising agency came to be the cadres. The many forms of persuasion gradually narrowed to threats and coercion; the positive reasons offered for peasants to sign up gave way to “You have no choice,” thus denying them agency. In Lăţea’s interviews, one respondent explained the subtle form of his refusal to join: “You know how it was? You had to look for some reasons so instead of saying ‘I don’t want to join’ [thus attributing agency to oneself], you would say ‘I’m unable to want to join, because something is keeping me from it, I’m prevented by something!’ ” (2003: 38). In this way, people would deny their own agency as part of an attempt to assert it by refusing to join the collective. Further denial of peasants’ agency came in the travesty of the “entry petitions” they were compelled to sign. Unlike the petitions for dechiaburization described above, which were an assertion of initiative and of hope, the petitions to join the collectives were written for them, stating (in one variant), “Of my own free will and uncoerced by anyone, I donate [to the collective all my land, my implements, and my animals].” In this way, cadres’ exercise of hope—to create a new property form and a new socialist man, or to build a party career and avoid being purged— required constraining others whose sense of prospective momentum aimed in wholly different directions: family ownership and selves defined by mastery. Cadres failed to bring these two sets of hope into alignment, to produce an imagining that would persuade people, so as to unify the two momentums. Even those poorer peasants who did join often brought no momentum: they waited, rather than working.

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It is worth noting, however, the larger context in which these redistributions and denials of agency were occurring: one overwhelmingly dominated by the intentions of the Soviet Communist Party. The ultimate expropriation of initiative was the Soviet Union’s usurping the agency of Romania’s party leaders. Within these constraints, Romanian cadres managed at most to produce their own precarious careers, at the expense of others’ hope.

Conclusion I have been seeking to identify some of the spaces of hope in the project of collectivization: hope on the part of cadres that they could entice peasants into collectives, so as to build their own careers as well as the communist future; hope by poor and landless peasants that if they joined the collectives, their lives would improve; and hope by the most persecuted group, the wealthy peasants, that if they could only figure out how to negotiate with the party-state, their persecution would stop. Each of these kinds of hope had its means: the ongoing techniques of persuasion that cadres sought to perfect, the workings of the collective in which poor peasants saw their path to hope, and the carefully worded petitions that chiaburi employed to revise their situations. Over time, however, these forms of hope were crushed. Cadres gave up trying to entice people and instead browbeat and threatened them; most collectives proved anything but a route to a better life; and petitions for dechiaburization might or might not succeed—and might be followed by rechiaburization, beginning the whole process all over again. The end—hope in a utopian project—was aborted by the means used to achieve it. Let me conclude with two observations concerning the future directions of this research. The first is a methodological question: How do we find hope in the kind of material amassed for this project? In retrospective interviews, people rarely admit to having placed hope in the communist experiment. They present themselves as having had to join the collectives, not as having wanted to join them; hope appears nowhere as a motivation. But how reliable are these representations? Is it not likely that, in the wake of the repudiation and complete dismantling of the collectives, our respondents want to present themselves as having had nothing to do with creating them in the first place? Here we run into one of the much-belabored limitations of the retrospective interview as a source of data about anything more than the interviewee’s presentation of self to an interviewer in a particular time and

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place. Similarly, in party documents, we cannot trust the genuineness of expression of those who wrote them. For example, do those documents that describe people’s joy at the produce they are receiving, early in the life of those model collectives, actually indicate a basis for hope—either on the recipients’ part or on that of the cadres writing the reports? I find it unlikely. Such documents probably tell more about the party’s effort to create an official language than about the dispositions of those doing the writing or of those whose reactions are being described. It would seem that in this case, at least, the “method of hope” is not easy to reconcile with a historical anthropology of socialism. The second is an observation about the connection of hope with nonmarket- and market-based forms, the latter having entered Romania with full force after 1989. I have been describing the dashing of hopes in a system governed not by the “invisible hand” of the market but by the very visible fist of the party. Is the market better than the party was at keeping hope alive? Following the collapse of communism, many of its former subjects were euphoric at the prospects of the well-being that they hoped were now opening up to them. I have written elsewhere of the extraordinary hope aroused by a pyramid scheme in the mid-1990s (Verdery 1995). The jubilation of participants in it reminds us that neoliberalism has been brilliant at capturing hope, at being seen as its repository. Villagers’ sense of possibility, however, lasted less than a decade: the integration into world-market prices for fuel, as well as EU agricultural protectionism and the opening of price scissors between agricultural commodities and industrial inputs into farming, left most of these newly impropriated landowners economically marginalized, their hope fading in the midst of tremendous uncertainty and risk (Verdery 2003). This reminds us that if we are to ask about hope and the market, we must specify the conditions for “perfection” of these markets and the forces that “distort” them, variously wringing out of people in economically vulnerable situations the grounds for hope.

Notes All translations from Romanian to English are by Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery. 1. The project included a team assembled by myself and Gail Kligman totaling nineteen people, mostly Romanian scholars, who from 2000 to 2004 conducted both archival research and oral-history interviews concerning how collectivization was

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accomplished. Entitled “Transforming Property, Persons, and State: Collectivization in Romania, 1948–1962,” the project was funded by the Center for European and Russian Studies at UCLA, the National Science Foundation (grant no. BCS 0003891), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (contract no. 816-12g). We are grateful to these organizations for their support and for allowing us the independence to offer analyses that may be totally contrary to their wishes. The results of the project can be found in Iordachi and Dobrincu 2009 and Kligman and Verdery 2011. 2. The term “richer” should be understood in context: many of the peasants labeled chiaburi had no more than four or five hectares, some even fewer. 3. Consiliul Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii (CNSAS) Fondul Documentar (FD) 42/1952, f. 50. 4. Membership in the Romanian Communist Party went from one thousand in 1944 to over one million in 1948. 5. In Ieud, former chiaburi have remained lifelong friends with those who risked their own lives to support them during the trying years of collectivization. 6. Direcția Județeană a Arhivelor Naționale Hunedoara (DJAN HD), Fond Sfat Popu lar Raion Orăştie (FSPRO), fi le 10/1951 (n.p.). 7. Ibid. 8. A complete contestation fi le might include the petition, some letters of reference, the recommendation of the delegate, the decision of the district people’s council, and occasionally communications from the regional administration. See, for example, DJAN HD, FSPRO, fi le 7/1954 (n.p.). 9. DJAN HD, FSPRO, fi le 37/1952 (n.p.). The details of the contestations come from Fond Sfat Popu lar Raion Orăştie, fi le 7/1954 (n.p.). 10. DJAN HD, FSPRO, fi le 7/1954 (n.p.). 11. DJAN HD, FSPRO, fi le 37/1952 (n.p.). 12. DJAN HD, FSPRO, fi le 7/1954 (n.p.). 13. The first two items are from Dobrosloveni (Oltenia region; see Lăţea 2009: 344); the third item is from Ieud (Maramureş region), source “Cererile de înscriere” GAC “Iza,” Sighet, fi le 1/1962, 32, 34.

References Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Iordachi, Constantin, and Dorin Dobrincu, eds. 2009. Transforming Peasants, Property, and Power: Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1948–1962. Budapest: Central European University Press. Jowitt, Kenneth. 1978. The Leninist Response to National Dependency. Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California.

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Kideckel, David. 1982. “The Socialist Transformation of Agriculture in a Romanian Commune, 1945–62.” American Ethnologist 9: 320–40. Kligman, Gail, and Katherine Verdery. 2011. Peasants Under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962. Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton University Press. Lampland, Martha. 1995. The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lăţea, Daniel Puiu. 2003. “Colectivizare la Dobrosloveni, Oltenia.” Unpublished report for the project “ ‘Transforming Property, Self, and State: Collectivization in Romania, 1949–1962.” ———. 2009. “Revolution in Bits and Pieces: Collectivization in Oltenia, Southern Romania.” In Transforming Peasants, Property and Power: The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962, ed. Constantin Iordachi and Dorin Dobrincu, 329–54. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2005. “From Sugar Canes to ‘Swords’: Hope and the Extensibility of the Gift in Fiji.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 277–95. Negrici, Eugen. 2005. “Rolul literaturii în campania de colectivizare.” In Ţărănimea şi puterea: Procesul de colectivizare a agriculturii în România, 1949–1962, ed. Dorin Dobrincu and Constantin Iordachi, 154–73. Iaşi, Romania: Polirom. Verdery, Katherine. 1995. “Faith, Hope, and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids, Romania 1991–1994.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(3): 623–69. ———. 2003. The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Hope and Society in Japan Yuji Genda

Hope Studies in Japan In the 2005 academic year, the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science embarked on a project entitled “Hope Studies” (Kibou-gaku in Japa nese). These days, reflections on the future of Japanese society are not generally couched in particularly optimistic terms, tending to dwell on such issues as the ongoing aging of society, the impoverishment of regional economies, mounting fiscal deficits, the intensification of global competition, and the paralysis of the education system and consequent concerns regarding widening social disparities. These apparently gloomy prospects for society as a whole may, in turn, be taken to signal a widespread loss of hope, forcing us to question whether, and in what form, hope exists among individuals living in such a bleak society. The most common question asked by the many people who have shown interest in our project has been “What on earth is hope?” Richard Swedberg, in a paper prepared for an international conference on hope studies held in December 2007 in Tokyo, discussing previous work in the field, wrote that hope is “a wish for something to come true” (Swedberg 2007). He argued that hope is different from abstract reveries, which are vague and not concrete. Seigo Hirowatari delved further into the definition of hope, summarizing past discussions regarding hope studies and stating, “Hope is a subjective representation that is wanted as something desirable for the future” (Hirowatari 2009: 24). According to the Japanese unabridged dictionary Kojien published by Iwanami Shoten (2008), a representation, or Vorstellung in

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philosophy, is “an image of an external object expressed within consciousness based on perception. There are cases where an object is in front of us (representation of perception), and is reproduced by memory (memory representation) or by the imagination (imagination representation). This distinguishes it from concept or principle in terms of sensuous and concrete points.” There are many commonalities between the definitions by Swedberg and Hirowatari. Hirowatari also suggested at the conference that “by action” should be added to the definition given by Swedberg; that is, hope is a wish for something to come true by action. Thus, hope can be defined to a certain extent but, at the same time, its contents are diverse. For example, signs containing the word “hope” (kibou in Japanese) can be seen in Japanese noodle shops, reading “No extra charge for customers hoping for large portions.” On the other hand, students in Japanese elementary schools practice calligraphy in class and often paint the word “kibou” as an expression of dreams for the future. In accordance with the definition of representation, the former hope has to do with representations that exist in front of us, like the large noodle portions, while the latter relates to an imaginary representation of a bright future for young kids. While the former is very specific, the latter is quite abstract. Further, the former is felt by an individual who is ready to eat, while the latter expresses a desirable state for society beyond the level of individuals. Thus, various types of hope can be categorized based on a number of criteria, such as concreteness, achievability, and sociality.

Hope for the Japanese How, then, does hope exist among the Japanese as something to be fulfilled or attained in the future? For the Hope Studies project, we conducted two nationwide surveys between 2005 and 2006. The first was a questionnaire carried out over the Internet in May 2005, with 875 respondents aged from twenty to forty-nine years. Some of the analysis from the survey was published as a book titled Kibou-gaku (Hope studies) (written and edited by Yuji Genda [2006a]). Based on these results, we conducted a second, larger nationwide survey in January 2006. We received responses from 2,010 men and women aged from twenty to fift y-nine years. A detailed analysis is available in Genda (2009).

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It seems that at the beginning of the 2000s, Japanese people had generally lost hope, as symbolized by Ryu Murakami’s book Kibou no kuni no ekusodasu (Exodus to a land of hope), published in 2000, and Masahiro Yamada’s book Kibou kakusa shakai (The stratified hope society), published in 2004. We, the Hope Studies project, also made a vague forecast before the beginning of the surveys that the majority of respondents would report having no hope. In this sense, it came as a surprise for us that, in both surveys, nearly 80  percent of respondents said they had held some hope (more specifically, 76.5 percent on the first questionnaire and 78.3 percent on the second). Further, on the mail-in survey, 80  percent of those who reported having hope forecast that it would be attainable, as seen in their answers “Attainable” (24.1 percent) and “Probably attainable” (57.3 percent). Consequently, it was found that 63.2  percent of all the respondents had hopes that they thought were attainable. Different judgments can be made about the fact that about two-thirds of all the respondents believed they had attainable hope. One can be encouraged by the fact that so many had hope, or be seriously discouraged by the fact that a third of all people lacked hope or felt that they only had impossible hopes. In addition, we can only answer “We do not know” to the question of whether hope is being lost among the Japanese, since no survey has yet been conducted based on an identical perspective or standard to date. A greater percentage of Japanese may have had hope during the years of high economic growth, but there might have already been not a few people who failed to find their hopes even during that period. As of 2006, many Japanese had hopes regarding their work. In response to a multiple-choice question on the contents of hopes, the top answer was  “work” (66.3  percent), followed by “ family” (46.4  percent), “health” (37.7  percent), and “leisure” (31.7  percent). We would like to conduct a further cross-national survey on whether the position of work as the top answer is a special characteristic of Japanese. It is also clear that happiness and hope are closely related. In response to the question “Do you think you are happy now?” the percentage of people answering “I definitely think so” was 24.6 percent among those who reported having attainable hopes and just 13.1  percent among those who did not. In addition, just 10.3 percent of those who said they had hopes but felt they were not attainable answered that they definitely felt happy, a percentage even lower than among those who reported not having hope. Hope only leads to a strong sense of happiness when it is attainable.

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We also asked respondents about the significance of having hope. Among the respondents, 80.9 percent said they positively appreciated hope as a vital force for life and/or opportunities to encounter people who shared the same purpose. On the other hand, 15.6  percent denied the need for hope or saw hope negatively, as shown by the answer that it was spoiling oneself to even think about hope. The data show that people with a more pessimistic and negative perspective of the paradigms of society or their roles in it tend to have the least hope. In other words, people who believe “Society is becoming worse and worse,” “In general, we cannot trust people,” or “It is not a problem if I, as just one person, do not vote in elections” are more likely not to have hope. Thus, individual views of society and hope are also closely related.

Hope as Possibility Not all Japanese have lost hope, but this is not to say that all have hope, either. Why does this gap exist between individuals who have hope and those who do not have hope? To answer this question, we conducted a quantitative analysis of factors that determine whether a person has hope or not, using the aforementioned mail-in questionnaire (Genda 2009). Specifically, we used a statistical tool called a probit analysis to look for factors in the individual questionnaire answers that influenced whether people reported having hope. The analysis of the relationship between objective attributes and hope concluded that individual factors, such as gender, age, education, and health, influenced the possession of hope. Looking at gender, women were more likely than men to answer that they had hopes, particularly attainable ones. Men were more likely to report having hopes related to work but had more negative views on hope compared with women. In terms of age, in general, younger people, that is, those in their twenties and thirties, were more likely to have hope. The level of education received also had a strong influence on the possession of hope. Those who received postsecondary education showed a stronger tendency to have attainable hopes and hopes about work. Further, those whose perception of their health was good tended to answer that they had attainable hopes. Hope is also clearly influenced by income and employment situation. The analysis showed that individuals earning less than 3 million yen a year

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(about $30,000, as one dollar is equal to one hundred yen) were less likely to have attainable hopes and, in par ticu lar, that people who had no income at all were very likely to lack hopes regarding work. Further, individuals and members of families with a total annual income exceeding 10 million yen ($100,000) tended to answer that they had hope, particularly attainable hopes. In general, these results indicate that hope is strongly influenced by the possibilities stemming from individual choices and actions. Youth implies the open possibility of time for the future, and the loss of health implies a limitation of the possibility of action. Education, by deepening knowledge, increasing experiences, and improving capabilities, also expands the possibilities for choices. The fact that it is still more difficult for women to have hopes about work shows that they have more limited employment possibilities than men in Japanese society. Needless to say, individual or household income directly influences the size of the budget for making purchases in the market. Unemployment means a loss not only of income sources but also of self-fulfi llment and a sense of usefulness gained from employment. Japanese society suffered serious economic stagnation from the 1990s to the beginning of the 2000s. The recession was also a process of negative change that reduced various possibilities that had once been open or at least were believed to be open.

Background of the Sense of Stagnation We can conclude from the above-mentioned analyses that the specific changes that cause a sense of the closing off of hope among individuals are (1) a higher percentage of senior citizens in the population distribution, (2) an increase in the number of people who are out of work or earning low incomes, (3) a decrease in high-income families, (4) a worsening health situation, and (5) a stagnating educational advancement rate. A continuously aging population means, as a matter of course, a tendency toward a drop in the youth population. According to the National Census issued by the Statistics Bureau of the MIAC (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications), the percent of people younger than thirty among all inhabitants of Japan aged fifteen years or older was 25.8  percent in the 1995 survey. However, this rate dropped to 23.7  percent in the 2000 survey and, in the latest one, conducted in 2010, to 17.8 percent. The decrease

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in the youth population accompanying the aging of society is one of the background factors that have caused a drop in the percentage of people who have hope. In the 1980s, Japan enjoyed a significantly lower unemployment rate than that in other developed countries. However, the rate rose sharply throughout the long recession after the 1990s, and hit 5.4 percent in 2002, the highest figure since the beginning of unemployment surveys. Issues of social concern include not only the increase in jobless people who are looking for a job, but also an increase in people who have given up finding work, the socalled NEETs (not in education, employment, or training). In 2005, we made an estimate of the number of people who did not have an income-generating job, including unemployed persons and NEETs but not students and housewives or househusbands, based on the Employment Status Survey conducted by the Statistics Bureau of the MIAC (Genda 2005). We found that the number of unemployed people aged from fifteen to forty-nine years was 1.84 million in 1992, and this increased by more than a million to 3.03 million in 2002. The rise in the number of jobless people with no earnings is one of the causes of the drop in the percentage of people with attainable hopes. Throughout the 1990s, not only the unemployed but also so-called freeters (job hoppers), people with a “career” as part-time workers, increased in number. The MHLW (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare) estimated in its White Paper on the Labor Economy 2004 that the freeter population was 2.17 million as of 2003, based on the Labor Force Survey conducted by the Statistics Bureau of the MIAC. The number of freeters increased from 1.01 million in 1992 to 1.51 million in 1997, growing by one hundred thousand every year. It is estimated that many freeters as well as “working poor,” who drew significant attention in 2006, earn less than 3 million yen annually, and this increase in the low-income population has led to a decrease in the number of people with attainable hopes. As the economic recession dragged on, the number of households with high-income earners decreased. According to the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure conducted by the Statistics Bureau of the MIAC, the percentage of households earning 10 million yen or more annually among the one hundred thousand surveyed was 16.6  percent in 1999 but only 12.2  percent in 2004. This tendency led directly to a decrease in the number of people having hope. The aging of society will bring an increase in the number of people feeling anxious about their health. The health situation has also worsened

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among the younger population. According to the Employment Status Survey conducted by the Statistics Bureau of the MIAC and other surveys, the number of people working for more than sixty hours a week increased during the period from the 1990s to the beginning of the 2000s among men in their thirties and early forties and women in their twenties, all groups in the prime of life. Given the chronic long working hours and the shift to performance-based appraisal systems, increasing numbers of working people are said to have been stricken by physical or mental ailments. The Survey on Workers’ Health Conditions conducted by the MHLW suggests that people in their thirties to fifties felt more stress or had more troubles about their work in the 2000s than in the 1990s. The rate of advancement to higher education has nearly hit a ceiling, after a long rise during the postwar period. According to the Basic Surveys on Education conducted by MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), the advancement rate, which is calculated by dividing the number of enrollments in universities, junior colleges, vocational schools, and five-year technical junior colleges by the total eighteen-year-old population, was just 10 percent or so in the 1950s. However, it rose with the rapid economic growth, reaching nearly 50  percent in the 1980s. It further increased almost constantly even after the 1990s, when Japan’s bubble economy burst, finally coming to exceed 70 percent. However, the advancement rate has shown some change in the 2000s. The university enrollment rate reached its peak and stabilized around 50  percent after that. It will make it easier for wealthy individuals who want to advance to higher education to enter university, since the total capacity for new enrollments for all the universities in Japan has been politically kept constant or even increased in spite of the decreasing number of youths. Nevertheless households that cannot afford the expensive entrance fees and tuition will have no choice but to forego higher education for their children. There is no clear evidence that hope is being lost in Japanese society, since there were no continuous surveys on hope in the past. However, there is sufficient statistical evidence to suggest the possibility that an atmosphere of hopelessness for the future has come to fill the entire society, as shown by the frequent use of the term “sense of stagnation” since the 1990s. A stagnation that prevents us from feeling hope has spread with the increase in individuals whose choices have shrunk, as seen in the aging society, increases in jobless people and low-income earners, decrease in high-income

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households, a worsening health situation, and a stagnating rate of advancement to higher education.

Lonely Individuals A desirable society is one in which many individuals can have hope as long as the possession of hope leads to happiness. What kind of policy, then, will contribute to a social situation that generates hope? The policy implications of the above-mentioned questionnaires are clear. Measures must be taken against the falling birthrate in order to halt the aging of the population. Appropriate fi nancial and monetary policies are needed to halt the worsening economy to make possible a decrease in the number of low-income earners. Further, it is essential to make the economy high value through technological innovation as a part of an economic policy to survive in the face of global competition. The improvement of welfare policies, such as the pension system, is urgently needed to provide relief to senior citizens with low incomes and difficult lives. We also need to put into place detailed and sustainable employment policies that can be adapted to various circumstances in order to cut the number of jobless and low-income earners. Medical policies must be put into place to improve the health situation, and labor policies are needed to prevent chronic long working hours in order to help mental health care in the workplace. Education measures, such as scholarships, must be strengthened for youths who find it difficult to proceed to higher education. If these policies are implemented appropriately, there will be an increasing number of individuals with attainable hopes. These policies were discussed in established social science fields such as economics before the issue of hope was discussed. The main task of economics is to examine how to expand economic wealth and increase options in order to increase the satisfaction and utility of individuals. In other words, if the issue of individual hope goes back purely to financial capacity, all we need is economics, and there is no need to take on hope studies. However, while in the Hope Studies project we have recognized the importance of such economic issues, we have presumed that fundamental social collective problems are tied to the representation of hope. One such problem is the connection between issues concerning interpersonal relationships and hope. The national mail-in survey we conducted

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included questions about personality as perceived by the respondents themselves. We analyzed the responses among those with attainable hopes to the question, “Are you good at cooperating with others?” Among those who answered, “I think so,” meaning that they perceived themselves to be skilled at cooperating with one another, 69.9  percent reported having attainable hope. The rate was about 5  percent lower (64.8  percent) among those who answered, “To some degree.” The percentage was even lower (56.6 percent) for those who answered, “Not really,” meaning that they believed they were not very skilled at cooperating with others, and 48.0 percent for those who answered, “I do not think so,” meaning that they believed they were not skilled at cooperating. These results suggest that people who are good at cooperating with others are more likely to have attainable hopes. In contrast, we also looked at the percentage of respondents with attainable hopes who reported being “lonely” currently. Among those who answered, “I do not think I am lonely,” 69.5  percent had hope. On the other hand, only 49.2  percent of those who answered, “I feel lonely,” had hope, showing a major difference between the two. It is also clear from the relation between having hope and the number of friends that hope is influenced by relationships with others. The percentage of respondents with attainable hopes who reported “many” friends was 75.3; 65.0 percent reported “quite a few” friends, 59.3 percent reported “not so many,” and 55.4 percent reported “few.” It is obvious that the number of friends has a great deal to do with hope. Why does having friends influence the possession of hope? Akiko Nagai explains some of the background for why friends give people hope: “We receive various evaluations from society, such as grades and performance for students and assessments in the workplace for workers. In contrast to such evaluations made by society, friends accept us for ‘our usual selves,’ ‘our natural selves,’ or ‘our real selves,’ even if their real opinions may differ. Approval from friends gives us a sense of identification being different from others, in a way that is not limited to roles and positions in society” (2006: 99–100). The argument that acceptance from friends gives us a feeling of significance, a sense that our existence is valuable, and further leads us to have hope for the future is somewhat persuasive. If this is so, then those at risk of losing hope may be not only those experiencing economic problems but also those who are losing their own sense of social significance due to the loss of communication with others.

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The increasing isolation found among Japanese people, as shown by the increasing number of single households in every generation and the emergence of solitary deaths (people who die alone at home without anyone knowing) as a social issue along with bullying, truancy, NEETs, and social reclusiveness, became an increasingly serious social problem in the 1990s and the early 2000s. The fact that socially isolated individuals are increasing will be another facet of the society characterized by the loss of hope.

Expectation and Confidence of the Family When we have difficulties communicating with others, family members, who are the closest people to us, offer their support. In fact, the possession of attainable hopes is also influenced by the family situation we experienced in childhood. In response to a question on the economic circumstances of their families when they were junior high school students, 66.5  percent of those who answered, “We were affluent,” including those answering “We were somewhat affluent,” currently had attainable hope. On the other hand, among those who answered, “We were not affluent,” the percentage of those with attainable hope was 59.0 percent. Therefore, there was a measurable gap between these two groups. However, there is a factor in the family situation of our childhood that influences current hope even more than do economic restraints: the family’s confidence in and expectations of the individual. When questioned whether they had felt trusted by their family members during their childhood, only 54.4 percent of those who answered, “No (I did not),” reported having attainable hope. In contrast, 66.1 percent of those who answered, “Yes (I did),” had attainable hope. The gap between these two groups was more than 10 percentage points, an even larger gap than that seen in the economic situation. Questions about the family’s expectations gave similar results. The percentage of individuals reporting the presence of hope was nearly 10 percent higher among those who were a focus of family expectations than among those who were not. It is said that excessive expectations can make children timid or ner vous, leading to a gloomy outlook on the future. However, the surveys show that expectations and confidence can be driving forces for children to awaken to their own potential value and strive to fulfill it, and this makes them more likely to have hope.

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Of course, excessive expectations by parents and family members toward children’s capabilities and aptitudes can potentially lead to despair. In fact, it is sometimes impossible for children to fulfi ll the expectations due to pressure from their parents regarding their performance on an entrance exam, for example. This can lead to discord between the children and their parents or family members, distrust of a society that does not seem to appreciate them, and deep disappointment. Therefore, it is impor tant for family members to have moderate and stable expectations for their children, allowing them to find their own direction in realizing their potential. Even if such hopes end in disappointment, the sense of security and trust that comes from feeling supported by family members can lead to further hope. As a result, even if the first hope ends in failure, it opens the possibility for reaching an attainable goal or fi nding a satisfactory situation in which the contents of hopes are appropriately adjusted, as explained later. However, the basis for such peace of mind and confidence in the family may be undermined. Anne Allison (2009) looks at changes in the family as a background for the loss of hope among many children in Japan. She suggests that as a result of the collapse of the family system, which once supported a sense of security, young people are losing the capability to imagine a future based on peace of mind. She argues that “the sociality of caring for others is being lost and being replaced by a tendency to worry about their own future” (2009: 140). Hirowatari (2009) defined peace of mind as an emotional state that sees the future as holding no risk, that is, no danger. Based on this definition, he argued that hope and peace of mind are factors that give people a happy emotional state concerning their future. Though they are both factors that relate to future happiness, peace of mind requires continuity, while hope characteristically requires some change in general. Hope and peace of mind have similarities and differences, but the finding that family confidence and expectations lead to hope suggests that peace of mind is an important precondition for the creation of hope itself.

Hope in Relationships Human relations, such as those with friends and family members, have a significant influence on the hopes of individuals. An increasing number of

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people are facing difficulties with interpersonal relations, and the family, which ideally provides reliability, has become unstable. Further, people who do not seem to have special problems with their daily personal relationships feel constant pressure to continuously improve their communication skills as the ser vice industry becomes ever more sophisticated. The spread of such pressure is also one of the characteristics of an information and ser vice society. It has been argued, mainly in sociology, that the state of human relations is a crucial issue when thinking about social structure. Specifically, concepts like “social network” and “social capital” have been used to discuss the social structure of personal relations. Mary Brinton (2010) proposes the concept of ba, or place, as a characteristic of such social networks in Japan. Strong collective ties in families and sometimes in workplaces and local communities have provided the bedrock for a sense of security among Japanese people. In contrast to U.S. society, which is based on weak ties between individuals—a concept from sociology—Japanese society values strong ties within a ba. According to Brinton, the ba has been collapsing under globalization and low growth, and this tendency constitutes the basis for the change in Japanese society. We suggested that weak ties are currently more influential in the possession of hopes toward work, which Japanese value highly (Genda 2007). Specifically, we analyzed the relationship between types of friends and hope based on the questionnaires. Consequently, we have found that individuals with friends—other than family members, relatives, and colleagues—who have “expectations toward them,” “greatly appreciate their abilities and efforts,” and “listen to their anx ieties and problems” are more likely to have attainable hope. It has also been found that the existence of friends outside of work with whom it is possible to speak frankly makes it easier for people to have hope toward work, which is the object of highest interest among Japa nese. Why is this so? Communicating with people outside our own family and the workplace mean talking to people who have lived in a different world from our own and who have accumulated their own unique values and experiences accordingly. It can be recognized, from a sociological perspective, that possessing so-called third relationships, beyond kin and work, and gaining precious information from them that cannot be obtained in our everyday lives can help to create hope.

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In 2006 our Hope Studies project started fieldwork in Kamaishi City, Iwate Prefecture, where the tsunami disaster had hit after the large earthquake in east Japan on March 11, 2011, and many people had died or gone missing. We found that many people reported that interpersonal encounters and ties were very important for generating hope. It is easy to be impressed by the story of Toshio Yahata, a man in his seventies who sought to renew hope in his community by selling mineral water. He had previously used forestry to repay a debt of hundreds of millions of yen resulting from the bankruptcy of an amusement park that he himself had run to create jobs in the community. When I asked Yahata in 2006 how he had been able to overcome these many hardships, he responded, in a faltering but clear voice, “At least three persons understood and helped me at any time I had faced a difficulty. Therefore I fortunately never lost hope” (Institute of Social Science and Genda 2009: 30). One day Yahata had a chance to give a lecture to junior high school students in Kamaishi. The students were surprised and encouraged to hear his story for the first time. Then one student asked him some questions: “What is your hope or dream now? Are you afraid if your hope does not come true?” With a smile, Yahata clearly answered him, “I have a dream. I dream to die with pursuing dream. I do not care if my dream will not come true. I am satisfied if someone can understand that I keep searching for hope until I die.” Yahata tried to deliver his opinion by creating weak ties with young generations who would fulfi ll his hope of rebuilding their hometown, Kamaishi. The shift in the social network from strong to weak ties is not necessarily a smooth one for all individuals. Rather, there is concern that there will be an increase in individuals who lack both a sense of security based on strong ties and hope based on weak ties, after being excluded from all networks. According to some sociologists, the issue of poverty, which has grown ever more serious as a social problem since the middle of the 2000s, needs to be considered as a form of “social exclusion” in that it severs various social ties. However, if it is possible to analyze hope purely as such human relations, as was seen in the aforementioned relationship between economics and hope, hope studies remains within the scope of sociological research. But the concept of hope has an impor tant social dimension that goes beyond that possibility of choices influenced by economic situations such as income, jobs, and education and the issues of social networks caused by personal

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relations. This gives us new hints for answering the fundamental question, Why does hope in society need to be discussed now?

Three Facts About the Hope That Remains Many hopes turn to despair. But the repeated modification of hope leads to motivation.

In our Internet-based survey about hope, we asked adults between the ages of twenty and forty-nine years what they had wanted to become when they were elementary and junior high school pupils. Based on 639 answers from people who were currently employed, we investigated the relation between past hopes for occupation and current occupations. In the survey, 70.9 percent of respondents said they had had hopes to enter into a specific profession when they were in sixth grade. Popular choices were teacher, athlete, driver, pilot, novelist, and cartoonist. The remaining 29.1 percent answered that they had had no such hope or did not remember. By the time they were in ninth grade, 62.1 percent of respondents continued to have something they wanted to become, although this rate is lower than that for sixth grade. Popular occupations that were hoped for in the ninth grade were those in the medical and pharmaceutical industry, such as pharmacist, nutritionist, nurse, and clinical technologist; those of professional and technical personnel such as computer programmers and system engineers; and that of teacher. Thus, 60  percent to 70  percent of current adults had hopes when they were in elementary and junior high school to engage in a certain profession. However, many did not succeed in realizing the hopes they had held in their childhood. According to our survey, just 15.1  percent of respondents were able to take on the job they had wanted at the time they were ninth graders. Only 8.2 percent of currently employed people had realized the dreams they had held as sixth graders. Most of the hopes that children hold are not attained. This is the reality that many adults face. For youths who experienced the circumstances in the early 2000s, when employment opportunities were limited, the future was likely even gloomier with regard to their hopes for jobs. In addition, youths in an information society may intuitively understand that it has become even more difficult to attain their hopes. At a time when

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there was scarce information on achievability, it was possible for youths to have dreams or desires for future jobs even if they were beyond their abilities. However, youths living in an advanced information society seem to intuitively feel, based on the more accurate information, that they can never attain such dreams. The respondents were also asked whether their desired profession at the time they were in ninth grade underwent any subsequent changes. Some (42.5  percent) continued to hold on to the same hope, whereas others (36.0 percent) abandoned their original hope and chose another. The remainder lost hope and failed to regain it (21.5 percent). Next, we looked at the rates of employed people who answered, “I have a challenging job,” and compared this to the answers on desired work at the time of the ninth grade and its subsequent change. Those who answered, “I had a desired profession (when I was in ninth grade) but later changed to another,” were the most likely to hold challenging jobs. The number of those who had a challenging job was more than 10 percentage points higher in this category than among those who used to have hopes for a certain profession but subsequently lost them, never had any hope at all, or did not remember. Those who answered, “I continued to hope to become what I had wanted from the beginning,” were also likely to be doing a challenging job. However, the most surprising finding was that those who had changed their original hopes to new ones were even more likely to be doing something challenging than those who had continued to hold on to the same hopes. (The percentages were 90.5 in the first group and 87.1 in the second. The rate was lower among those who had given up their hopes—78.3  percent.) The fact that a modification of hope clearly influences motivation has been statistically demonstrated in a precise way through probit analysis (details are available in Genda 2006b; in addition, these results can be confirmed not only by the data from the survey conducted over the Internet but by that from the mailin survey; see Genda, Sato, and Nagai 2008). Many hopes are never attained. For many people, hopes end up as disappointment. If an individual wants to avoid disappointment or setbacks, he or she may choose not to have hope. Youths who say, “I cannot find something I want to become,” may be hesitating to express their hopes for fear of such a disappointment or setback. However, some hopes can be attained only after one has once held and subsequently lost hope. When we feel, in our current situation, that it is difficult to attain what we long wanted, it is natural for us to feel considerable

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shock. But processes are still available for adjusting or changing our hopes, which can only start from a setback. In other words, there are hopes regarding our potential and aptitude that can only emerge from failures. From the 1990s to the beginning of the 2000s, within a situation of enormous change in the political and economic systems, many individuals were losing hopes and failing to find new ones. An inability to adjust hope seems to have spread throughout society as a loss of hope.

Setbacks are sometimes unavoidable. But hope is waiting if failures are overcome.

This is another finding of our survey on hope. The largest focus of hope among Japanese involves work. However, more than half have been unable to accomplish the hopes for work they held before they began working. Moreover, even for those who were successful in landing the jobs they wanted, work has not always been smooth sailing with hope. In fact, when asked whether they had gone through setbacks or made mistakes regarding their work within five years of beginning the job, 48.4 percent of the respondents answered that they had. We do not have data on the details of the failures. It is possible that the respondents were overloaded with work, had troubles in their personal relationships, or lost confidence. The point is whether they were able to overcome the setbacks. According to our survey, 83.2 percent of those who experienced failures are currently confident of having overcome them. The figure is high but, at the same time, it is also significant that about 20 percent still have not been able to do so. This is significant because the experience of having overcome a setback in the past has significant influence on whether an individual has attainable hopes toward work. In concrete terms, among those who experienced failures during the first five years of working and managed to overcome them, 57.5  percent have attainable hopes toward work. On the other hand, just under half, or 45.0  percent, of those who experienced setbacks but felt they had been unable to overcome them have attainable hopes toward work. More surprising is the fact that just 47.2  percent of those who never experienced any setbacks have attainable hopes toward work, a percentage similar to that among those who did not succeed in overcoming setbacks. The above results show that experience overcoming a failure is closely linked

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to the possession of hope. Further, it is confirmed that this experience significantly influences hope even when differences between individuals, such as gender, age, academic background, income, and health, are controlled based on more strict statistical analyses. Why are setbacks so closely linked to hope? Yoshihiro Ishikura offers the following interpretation: “I have stated that a setback is not a simple element of the past but rather a tool that we use to position our present self in our ties with the past, and this is also true for hope. Hope is not simply the future, either, but depends on each individual’s evaluation of the current situation” (Ishikura 2006: 143). While setbacks and hopes are opposite in terms of the time axes of past and future, they share a common aspect in that they are representations positioned on the basis of the evaluation standard of the present. This means that those who have words for talking about a setback also have words to discuss hope, and vice versa. It is certain that when an individual understands the meaning of a past setback and can talk about it frankly, the future described by such a person will be somewhat bright. Shigeki Uno discusses the shape of hope from the perspective of time, such as in scenarios of waiting and being late, and focuses attention on the concept of the “misstep” proposed in a work by Shiro Yamauchi (2007), a researcher of medieval philosophy, entitled “Tsumazuki” no nakano tetsugaku (Philosophy of the “misstep”). Uno explains the concept with the peculiar expression that hope exists as “something to advance toward a future without an answer while stumbling and backing away” (Uno 2009: 280). It is also possible to recognize the relationship between hope and setback from a different dimension, starting from hope in work and philosophical discourse. According to Kaoru Sato’s analysis of the results of the Hope Studies project’s survey carried out over the Internet, it is clear that those who have not experienced romantic breakups are more likely to have given up on fi nding love or marrying (Sato 2006a). According to Sato, this tendency to give up on love and marriage is especially strong among men in their twenties. In September 2006, members of the Hope Studies project, including me, conducted an interview with Ran Kawai, who has done reportages on a number of infertility treatment clinics. Treatment that offers no guarantee of success often leads to a loss of hope. “Trying to have a baby” with fertilization treatment, Kawai explains in the interview, “sometimes becomes a procedure for abandoning the idea of having children” (Institute of Social Science and Genda 2009: 180). Some married couples speak quietly after the

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treatment is abandoned, using phrases such as “Thank you” and “I appreciate your hard attempt” with each other, and come to feel that they have “deepened their ties” and “shared precious time” from the bottoms of their hearts. In the interview, Kawai expressed this fact as follows: “Giving up hope is not necessarily a defeat but can be a form of improvement, going one step further. A due procedure can become a next step” (Kawai 2006: 185). We mentioned in the section “Background of the Sense of Stagnation” that the aging of society leads to a lower rate of people who have hope, based on the decrease in the percentage of young people, who tend to have hope. On the other hand, however, a society where senior citizens are the majority includes many people who have had a variety of experiences in the past. In particular, the experience of having overcome setbacks expands the hopes of senior citizens. Further, if members of the younger generation can overcome a difficult situation they face thanks to the experiences that are handed down by the older generations, they are more conscious of the existence of hope in society as a whole. In this sense, an aging society supported by the experience of having overcome hardship can be a society that becomes a source of new hope. Regarding this point, I was strongly impressed by a haiku poem written by Santoka Taneda, who was a poet of freestyle haiku: “On a straight path, I am lonely.” This passage may well symbolize the relationship between hope and setbacks. Since the 1990s, and particularly since 1998, Japan’s economic system, which was once highly praised around the world, has experienced various failures (Genda 2004). What has Japa nese society learned from these setbacks? To borrow Kawai’s concepts, how has the society “improved” through the failures, and what kind of “procedure” has it tried to adopt as a next step? New hope will never be created if the experiences of setbacks are not verbalized and shared. Other wise, it would not be possible to say that a winding path is not lonely.

The stance of not hesitating to do something, even when it is in vain, leads to attainable hope.

As long as hope is a subjective representation concerning the future (as explained in the section “Hope Studies in Japan”), it is significantly influenced by personal characteristics and qualities. In fact, Kaoru Sato statistically

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describes people who report having hope as having the following characteristics: “independence,” “a spirit of challenge,” “curiosity,” and “not too much diligence” (Sato 2006b: 41). Uno quotes philosopher Kiyokazu Washida (2004) from his book Matsu to iu koto (The meaning of waiting) as a hint for how to establish hope as an academic topic (Uno 2009). The concept of waiting, which has been proposed as an important element for thinking about hope, seems positioned opposite proactive actions such as taking on challenges and risk taking. At the same time, Naoki Kasuga’s (2007) book “Okure” no shiko (The idea of “belatedness”), to which Uno referred, includes observations on people who hesitate before making decisions and taking action, stop, and consequently become “late.” Those who are late, such as freeters, tend to be seen as people who lack hope in a society where quick and efficient decision making is required. However, is this really true? Kasuga and Uno ask the following question: Are not waiting and being late sources of hope? After a careful examination of the survey results from this viewpoint, I discovered an unexpected fact. In response to the self-judgments on personal characteristics given by participants in the questionnaires, 44.1 percent of respondents answered “I think so” or “I rather agree” to the general question, “Do you try to avoid efforts that are in vain?” The remaining percent stated that they sometimes did not hesitate to make wasted efforts. In reality, this difference in the way of looking at “waste” is deeply related to the possession of hope. The questionnaires showed that the percentage of people with attainable hopes was only 59.7 percent among those holding the former view, and a much higher 66.7 percent among the latter. Further, when we conducted quantitative analyses controlling for the influence of individual attributes, such as gender, age, academic background, income, and health, a stance of not hesitating to fight a losing battle was more common, in a statistically significant way, among those who had attainable hopes. We also examined those with a negative perception toward having hope. Many people who were reluctant to make vain efforts also had a negative stance toward the possession of hope, with 21.3 percent evaluating hope as being unnecessary. On the other hand, only 12.1  percent of those who would not hesitate to make wasted efforts took the meaning of hope to be negative. These estimates indicate that the willingness to fight a losing battle is closely related to the possession of hope. Then, what types of people can adopt a positive stance toward efforts that risk being wasted? We carried out a probit analysis of factors that regulated

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the percentage of respondents who were working, excluding students, and who reported they did not want to make vain efforts, in the same manner as in a conventional statistical analysis. Our conclusion is that male respondents in their twenties and thirties and individuals earning more than 8 million yen a year were more likely to answer this way. Based on this, we come to the interesting conclusion that, when controlling for all factors, including age, gender, academic background, income, marital status, and health, those who experienced setbacks in their first jobs and overcame them had a significantly strong tendency not to hesitate to fight a losing battle. The experience of overcoming a setback often means that some effort that seemed to be fruitless at the time of the setback consequently contributed to overcoming it. Memories of such experiences may lead to an understanding of the importance of efforts that cannot be measured in terms of short-term benefits alone. However, making wasted efforts and forecasting the achievability seem mutually contradictory from the viewpoint of efficiency. The commonsense view is that the best way to attain hope is to unfailingly make rational choices without wasted efforts. What is the significance of the fi nding that being willing to make wasted efforts is important for achieving hope? In order to attain a goal that has been completely set for the future, we have to devise and implement effective strategies. To do so, we have to collect information properly, and select and efficiently implement an optimal strategy for improving the probability for success. However, this selection and implementation require, as a precondition, some driving force. Hope, as an impetus for the future, may be a resolution of suffering failure and adjusting to it, in a situation where it is impossible to judge if the goal is vain. If so, hope is essentially created in a situation where a risk is taken on efforts that may end up wasted without being constrained by the criteria of certain efficiency. It is difficult to encounter what we have pursued and hoped for without an idea of play and space that does not exclude the possibility of wasted time and resources. A hopeful encounter is possible only with a daring detour and distance (Uno 2009). The process of experience consists of failing, waiting, and being late. These things are proactive and impor tant actions for finding hope, and not reactive stances. The suggestion that both behaving strategically, on the one hand, and being willing to tolerate the possibility of waste and playfulness, on the other, are important for achieving hope appears to be contradictory. However, the ambivalence contained in a single event, which includes taking a risk and

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waiting, or behaving strategically and tolerating waste, is an essential facet in discussing hope. The perception that hope contains ambivalence was steadily reinforced in dialogues between social scientists and anthropologists in 2007. The catalyst that generated this perception of ambivalence was a series of research projects on hope conducted by Hirokazu Miyazaki. From his fieldwork on securities traders, Miyazaki has discovered that fi nancial transactions involving speculation and arbitrage, which are treated as completely separate under classical economic theories, actually stand in very complicated and ambiguous relations (Miyazaki 2008). Economics textbooks tell us that arbitrage means acting to gain profits from a price differential that exists temporarily in the market with regard to an asset that is supposed to be of equal value anywhere. However, while it is a way to gain profits that avoids risks as much as possible, it is also very similar to speculation in that it entails taking risks based on a given view of the future. In fact, Miyazaki argues that ambivalence is the heart of arbitrage. The ambivalent situation influences not only financial technologies but also personal hope concerning arbitrage. Arbitragers on the cutting edge of the market economy possess a sense of ambivalence, with profound doubts about the behav ior of arbitrage itself that inevitably accompany direction toward an end, as well as strong pride as economic leaders that derives from a high degree of professionalism. Both the financial market and the market economy as a whole have by nature an ambivalent, rather than unilateral, directionality. From the perspective of equality, market principles are often seen as forming an infamous system that leads to widening gaps between the rich and the poor. On the other hand, the principles naturally contain an orientation toward equality, with the same remuneration being given to individuals with the same ability and motivation through competition. The market economy has a history of having remained a better system than any alternative, while entailing various problems such as poverty, and by its very nature it contains ambivalent evaluations. Nevertheless, the ambivalent recognition was not shared in Japanese society in the period between the 1990s and the early 2000s when globalization and deregulation led to tougher competition and greater uncertainty. Few people were able to see more than just one of the two aspects of the market economy, either as a mechanism of fear that generated poverty or as the only way to stimulate the economy. As indicated by these polarized evaluations

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of the market economy, only uniform assertions and concerns have been put forward on the desirable direction of society, and people’s flexibility and tolerance toward ambivalent ideas have weakened. The strengthening of such unambiguous social values, together with the economic stagnation and isolation of individuals, seems to have led to a spread of the feeling of a loss of hope.

Hope in Story “What does it mean to have ‘no hope’?” Michio Nitta asked this question in a seminar in July 2007 dedicated to setting up the Hope Studies project. People who are unable to find decent incomes or jobs, or who have health problems and have limited options available, are likely to feel a lack of hope. The number of people with such sentiments is increasing. Another group that is unlikely to have hope is those who have difficulties receiving expectations or confidence from their families or support from friends, and who face social isolation. However, are these only social factors for the sense of hopelessness? The three facts laid out in the previous section suggest that there are factors, in addition to affluence and human relations, that significantly influence hope. While probing into the historical background of the change in industrial relations, Nitta proposed that people were likely to feel a lack of hope when they were in a situation where they were “no longer able to imagine how to live in [the] future” (Nitta 2009: 178). Even when they face an uncertain future, people can feel hope toward a future challenge if they can see something bright ahead. On the other hand, even when they can forecast the future to a certain extent, they can still find hope if they have expectations for something they have not yet seen. People may feel, “It seems nearly visible but is not yet in sight” or “It seems like I’m seeing it, but I don’t quite see it.” Such ambivalent situations, which can stimulate the imagination, can be another force for hope that is different from affluence or human relations. A clue for considering these points can be found in a concept proposed independently by two researchers in the Hope Studies project. The concept is “fiction.” Seigo Hirowatari discusses hope as fiction in the law, examining the concept presented by Professor Saburo Kurusu, a scholar of civil law. Quoting

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Ho to fikushon (Law and fiction) by Kurusu (1999), Hirowatari states that “fiction” is not truth; it is not true that people are free and equal. However, neither is it a fabrication or a lie. It is an assumption of a state desired by people, rather than either a truth or a fabrication (Hirowatari 2009: 15–17). When we say that a nation is established based on social contracts among people, or that people possess free will, we are expressing these truths as a state of a desirable fiction, which is not true or false. Such fictions are interpreted as hope for desirable change in the direction of a society. The fictions become a basis for stimulating the imagination of society and individuals regarding their future direction. Annelise Riles (2007), a scholar of law, links legal fiction to hope from a different perspective. A legal fiction is an assertion that is carefully made by a plaintiff based on something that is incorrect but legally useful, such as a company legally being considered a person. Riles argues that it is only through such fictions that it is possible to look back at the past from the viewpoint of the present and, at the same time, to rearrange the future in a legal manner. Iwao Sato, a scholar of legal sociology who commented on Riles’s report at an international conference held in December 2007, also argues for the significance of legal fiction (Genda and Uno 2008). When individuals face conflicts, struggle, or troubles in their lawsuits, one of their hopes for the law is that somebody else will listen to them. According to Sato, they also see the possibility of settling an unfortunate past and regaining hope for the future by having their stories accepted or approved by others through procedures and behav iors based on legal fiction. The suggestion that hope as fiction plays an important role in settling the past and taking a step toward the future is also made by Hirokazu Miyazaki, who has carried out fieldwork on rituals in Fiji (Miyazaki 2004). The reason why many individuals have no choice but to constantly search for hope is that, to gather energy for advancing toward the future, they need a fiction to show a positive direction, which is neither true nor false. In this sense, hope itself is a fiction. However, the word “fiction,” which is commonly used in Japanese, tends to signify a false nature rather than an ambivalent concept that is neither truth nor lie, as it is usually understood as an “empty wish” or “made-up story.” Therefore, hereinafter, we would like use the term “story.” Hope is a story that is needed when confronting an uncertain future. A certain story exists wherever there is hope. The reason why hope can be a

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subject of study for social science is that the state of hope has a strong resonance with the social structure of the story shared in changes from the past to the present and from the present to the future. The suggestions created by the three facts confirmed in the previous section have an affi nity with the interpretation of hope as a story. The main characters in stories always experience twists and turns. There is no story without setback or failures, for such a story, if it exists, would be uninteresting. Only the experience of overcoming a setback can lead to the acquisition of eloquent words to talk about the future. In addition, for a story, unlike an academic thesis, the addition of redundancy and digression makes the contents more bountiful and attractive. This fits with my suggestion in the previous section that hope is accompanied by waste. Further, like many classics, stories that have been handed down contain contradictory and ambivalent elements and leave room for multiple interpretations. All classical stories, including works of literature, music, and performing art, continue to be shared through the ages, as they continue to have the power to be interpreted in a variety of ways. The story of hope is also ambivalent in many cases, and it contains diversity, which may be interpreted as contradiction. At the same time, hope is like a story in that its ending does not always bring happiness in the future. Just like stories have tragic endings, the attainment of hope does not necessarily equal future happiness. As shown in the data, attainable hope leads to a sense of happiness in the present. However, there is no guarantee that it will bring happiness in the future (Hirowatari 2009). History tells us that stories of specific individuals and groups who hoped to break down the status quo through war and massacres can result in unhappiness for the whole society. In this sense, it is also true that not all stories of hope receive social approval, and this fact reflects the danger and difficulty entailed in talking about hope in easy terms. In addition, the value of a story tends to be judged not by its practicality but by the intellectual excitement and impressions it creates. The true value is not judged by the criteria of usefulness and intelligibility alone. Rather, a story must stir the imagination, as shown by statements such as “It is interesting” and “I want to know more,” and this structure is common to hope. In contrast to hope, a sense of security is evaluated from a more pragmatic perspective, as it may require proof and guarantee. The three facts presented in the previous section show that individuals in stories, who are able to reflect on past setbacks and are characterized by

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the ability to think and act with flexibility, not ruling out the possibility of waste, are more likely to have the power to create hope. A society in a story is generated when such individuals are linked and, at the same time, circumstances in the story are intertwined to consequently create a story within the whole society. Here, the society in a story is a social context mainly composed of people who have been forced to modify hopes and who have the characteristic in story that they do not hesitate to make even wasted efforts, based on their experience of having overcome setbacks. Naturally, a society in a story is more likely to have people with hope. The structure of a story of society, formed by accumulated individual experiences and imagination, is deepened by the accumulation of social phenomena. Some classics remain unchanged, but many others, such as kabuki stories, are given new contents or are subjected to new interpretations in accordance with changing eras. Likewise, the structure of a story of society continues to exist by changing constantly through restructuring while maintaining its backbone. These characteristics of story that are shared by hope may be a clue for generating hope to communities in economic decline. The first step toward hope for a community begins with finding and sharing something that can be a foundation for continuing to change while trying to preserve something eternal.

A Society with a Playful Side Provides Hope Hope is a subjective representation of something desired for the future. As such, it is socially influenced by a range of possible options based on existential affluence, human networks formed based on various human relations, and the situation concerning the formation of a structure of story that goes beyond efficiency. The future of the economic circumstances for the expansion of hope to the society as a whole is a rocky one, as seen by the stagnant economic growth and the loss of population brought about by the lowering birthrate. In this case, the restructuring of personal relations in society can be seen as a measure for expanding hope. However, on the other hand, it is also a social fact that it has become increasingly difficult to form inter-human relationships, as symbolized by the problems of social reclusiveness, NEETs, and solitary deaths.

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In addition, accompanying the spread of a sense of loss of hope there seems to be a sense of discomfort regarding the strengthened emphasis on social values, such as the focus on efficiency and self-responsibility. The thorough implementation of market principles, as the core of a new standard, obviously brought a certain hope to a handful of people, along with a concrete vision for stimulating the stagnant economy and facing tough global competition. However, as a form of hope, the market principles failed to become shared by Japanese society as a whole, at least between the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. While social circumstances require us to make strategic judgments and to have a troubleshooting mentality in order to avoid failure, we also need to adopt a vision for a social direction that involves more than just speed and streamlining. However, the current social circumstances, in which there is no shared new social value for such a vision, have contributed to the expansion of the sense of loss of hope. One remaining opportunity for hope in a society engulfed in a long-term recession and facing increasingly difficult inter-human relations is to restructure the story for facing an uncertain future. Hope does not guarantee future happiness, but hope is a story that is necessary for advancing toward the future. A society with a story of hope is formed by people who can improve their capabilities for adjusting their lives while accepting past setbacks, and who have the willingness to take on apparently wasteful or reckless situations. The perception that hope is being lost has been spreading throughout Japanese society, but has done so most rapidly in the countryside, where circumstances are more critical. However, even in areas facing serious economic difficulties, as seen in the shuttered streets and the shrinking employment opportunities, the ability to generate hope has not necessarily been lost. The survey in Kamaishi conducted by the Hope Studies project has taught us that a long-nurtured culture and traditions have the potential to become stories that can create ties among the local population, and that even the rocky history of economic ups and downs that has continued from the past to the present can be a basis for fostering a story peculiar to the area. On the other hand, there are many causes for concern when looking at society from the viewpoint of hope. In par ticu lar, we will need to deepen discussions about a reexamination of the values that are thought to be preconditions for considering the direction of society. There has been a tendency, even in academic fields, for the standard of practicality to be given the highest priority, for elegant and easy-to-understand methods to be seen

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as most excellent, and for anything containing ambiguity to be excluded as being difficult to understand. However, it is difficult for society and individuals to have their own stories in circumstances where they are overwhelmed by solutions-based problem-solving thought. Of course, society exists even in the absence of such stories. In this sense, a story of hope only belongs to areas such as “play” and “space” in society. However, a social situation in which tolerance for play and space is lost may be the basis for the loss of hope. Play is that which, among thought and action, is preserved without being given ex ante value or significance. Only play entails chance encounters or discoveries, though play itself seems to be useless. No creativity or hope can be generated in a society without play. Once, when a reporter for a newspaper interviewed me on hope studies, I said, “Consequently, I think that hope requires play.” The young reporter asked me quizzically, “What is play?” I do not know why this question was asked. He might have had no space to consider play because his everyday hard work never allowed him to play. Or my comment may have seemed to be only a joke to generate his hope. Anyhow, a situation in which people need to look for certain definitions of play is perfectly appropriate as a symbol of a society without hope.

References Allison, Anne. 2009. “Shakai sei no ima: Kanjo, kazoku, soshite nihon no kodomo” [Sociality of the present: Affect, family, and Japanese kids]. In Kibou no hajimari: Ryudoka suru sekai de [The beginning of hope: In a changing world], ed. University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Yuji Genda, and Shigeki Uno, 129–49. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Brinton, Mary C. 2010. Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Genda, Yuji. 2004. Jyobu kurieishon [Job creation]. Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shimbun. ———. 2005. Hataraku kajo [Overcommitment of work]. Tokyo: NTT Publication, Inc. ———, ed. 2006a. Kibou-gaku [Hope studies]. Tokyo: Chuokoron Shinsha. ———. 2006b. “Kibou, shitsubou, shigoto no yarigai” [Hope, disappointment, motivation for work]. In Kibou- gaku [Hope studies], ed. Yuji Genda, 61–83. Tokyo: Chuokoron Shinsha. ———. 2007. “Kitai to shinrai ga nakereba kibou wa umarenai” [No hope without expectation and confidence]. In Kokan suru kagaku [Phatic science], ed. Bellsystem24 Research Institute, 190–209. Tokyo: Bellsystem24.

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———. 2009. “Data ga Kataru Nihon no Kibou” [Hope in Japanese data]. In Kibou wo kataru: Shakai kagaku no aratana chihei e [Speaking of hope: Towards a new horizon in the social sciences], ed. University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Yuji Genda, and Shigeki Uno, 127–72. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Genda, Yuji, Kaoru Sato, and Akiko Nagai. 2008. “Gakko ni okeru shokugyo kyoiku no keizaikoka” [Economic effects of vocational education at school]. In Journal of Quality Education 1: 51–68. Genda, Yuji, and Shigeki Uno, eds. 2008. Kibougaku kokusai konfarensu zenkiroku: Kibou to shakai noaratana chihei he [All documents of the international conference of hope studies: Toward a new horizon of hope and society]. ISS Research Series, Institute-wide Joint Research Project No.21, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo. Hirowatari, Seigo. 2009. “Kibou to henkaku” [Hope and change]. In Kibou wo kataru: Shakai kagaku no aratana chihei e [Speaking of hope: Towards a new horizon in the social sciences], ed. University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Yuji Genda, and Shigeki Uno, 3–29. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo, and Yuji Genda, eds. 2009. Kibou wo meguru taiwa: Kataribe, sasaete, okoshite, and tsutaete-tachi [Dialogues of hope: Narrators, Supporters, Entrepreneurs, and Translators]. ISS Research Series, Institute-wide Joint Research Project No.23, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo. Ishikura, Yoshihiro. 2006. “Zasetsu to kofuku, kibou wo kataru to iu koto” [Discussing setback, happiness and hope]. In Kibou-gaku [Hope studies], ed. Yuji Genda, 129–57. Tokyo: Chuokoron Shinsha. Iwanami Shoten. 2008. Koujien [Unabridged Dictionary]. Sixth edition. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Kasuga, Naoki. 2007. “Okure” no shiko: Posuto-kindai o ikiru [The idea of “belatedness”: Life in postmodernity]. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Kawai, Ran. 2006. Minin: “Umu” to kimerarenai [Non-pregnant: Non-decision of having a baby]. Tokyo: NHK Publishing. Kurusu, Saburo. 1999. Ho to fikushon [Law and fiction]. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. “Kin’yu toreda to kibou” [Financial traders and hope]. In Jinruigaku de sekai wo miru: Iryo, seikatsu, seiji, keizai [Seeing the world through anthropology: Medicine, life, politics, economy], ed. Kasuga Naoki, 281–98. Kyoto: Mineruva-shobo. Murakami, Ryu. 2000. Kibou no kuni no ekusodasu [Exodus to a land of hope]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunju-sha. Nagai, Akiko. 2006. “Tomodachi no sonzai to kazoku no kitai” [Existence of friends and family expectations]. In Kibou-gaku [Hope studies], ed. Yuji Genda, 85–109. Tokyo: Chuokoron Shinsha.

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Nitta, Michio. 2009. “ ‘Kibou ga nai’ to iu koto” [What is “no hope”?]. In Kibou wo kataru: Shakai kagaku no aratana chihei e [Speaking of hope: Towards a new horizon in the social sciences], ed. University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Yuji Genda, and Shigeki Uno, 173–90. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Riles, Annelise. 2007. “Legal Fictions: Technical Hope at the Center of Capitalism.” International Hope Studies Conference, Japan, December 18, 2007. Sato, Kaoru. 2006a. “Ren’ai to kekkon no Kibou-gaku” [Hope studies regarding love and marriage]. In Kibou- gaku [Hope studies], ed. Yuji Genda, 111–28. Tokyo: Chuokoron Shinsha. ———. 2006b. “Kibou ga aru hito, kibou ga nai hito” [The hopeful, the hopeless]. In Kibou-gaku [Hope studies], ed. Yuji Genda, 31–59. Tokyo: Chuokoron Shinsha. ———. 2006b. “Ren’ai to kekkon no Kibou-gaku” [Hope studies regarding love and marriage]. In Kibou-gaku [Hope studies], ed. Yuji Genda, 111–28. Tokyo: Chuokoron Shinsha. Swedberg, Richard. 2007. “The Sociological Study of Hope and the Economy: Introductory Remarks.” International Hope Studies Conference, Japan, December 18, 2007. Uno, Shigeki. 2009. “Shakai Kagaku ni oite Kibou wo Kataru toha” [Speaking of hope in social sciences]. In Kibou wo kataru: Shakai kagaku no aratana chihei e [Speaking of hope: Towards a new horizon in the social sciences], ed. University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Yuji Genda, and Shigeki Uno, 267–91. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Washida, Kiyokazu. 2006. Matsu to iu koto [The meaning of waiting]. Tokyo: Kadokawa Gakugei Shuppan. Yamada, Masahiro. 2004. Kibou kakusa shakai [The stratified hope society]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. Yamauchi, Shiro. 2007. “Tsumazuki”no nakano tetsugaku [Philosophy of the “misstep”]. Tokyo: NHK Publishing.

CHAPTER 5

Is the Law Hopeful? Annelise Riles

One of the central concerns of hope studies is the problem of living with, or under, capitalism. Yuji Genda (2005) draws attention to the difficulties people of various ages face to find the motivation to continue to act as economically productive units within society. Ghassan Hage (2003) describes a moral crisis in ordinary people’s lives surrounding how to respond to the triumph of capitalism. Naoki Kasuga analyzes the “freeter problem,” in which Japanese young people refuse to join the full-time labor force, as a new kind of resistence that is incomprehensible within both the framework of capitalism and its critiques (Kasuga 2007). Hirokazu Miyazaki (2004, 2006) considers how such diverse subjects as Japanese traders, Fijian villagers, and social theorists find the hope to continue in their respective roles in the global capitalist system. One common way of describing this problem is to say that what is at stake is the instrumentalization of agency: human agency is rendered, within the capitalist system, as mere instrument. In the hope studies literature, the problem is more often described as an intellectual, moral, or political crisis in which something that once could be assumed, or taken for granted, such as workers’ faith that a lifelong commitment to their employment would be justly rewarded, has now been lost. Hence people are disempowered not simply by outside forces but internally, by virtue of the fact that they have lost the energy and the motivation to go on. As I understand it, one of the defining aspects of hope studies is that it addresses the current moment explicitly in two dimensions at once: On the one hand, it aims to describe the conditions of others’ hope. On the

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other hand, it aims to produce the conditions for scholarly hope, that is, to replicate others’ hope on an academic terrain in which there is a parallel loss of confidence in the foundations and mission of social theory (Miyazaki 2004). By focusing on the linkages between the problems of people in the world and of scholars in the academy, the hope studies project also highlights the way the overinstrumentalization of the social sciences shuts down many of the most challenging questions before they can be answered. Hence the interest hope studies scholars have shown in fiction both as a source of material about hope and as a model for hopeful scholarship. Both Genda and Miyazaki draw inspiration from the work of the novelist Ryu Murakami ([2000] 2002), and in his larger project, Naoki Kasuga has written extensively about crime fiction (e.g., Kasuga 2005). It is comparatively interesting that law as a discipline has suffered no crisis on par with the crisis of social theory experienced by Hage and Miyazaki, and legal actors face no momentous problem of how to go on that is on par with those faced by the social actors studied by Genda, Kasuga, and others. This is despite generations of sophisticated efforts to create legal crisis through critiques of the way law, as an instrument of capitalism, embodies and perpetuates social inequality (Friedman 1973), for example, or critiques of the indeterminacy of legal doctrine—the fact that it can be used to produce or justify any outcome and hence gives legal actors no guidance about how to decide at all (Unger 1986). Perhaps most directly relevant to the concerns of Genda and Kasuga is the boredom that some critical legal scholars have expressed about legal argumentation. These scholars argue that they can no longer generate in themselves the enthusiasm to participate in the endless repetition of the same battery of arguments, the same playing out of old political and doctrinal positions (Kennedy 1997; Schlag 1995). One could say they are the freeters of the legal academy.1 But despite these small pockets of freeterism, what is more surprising about law, given its close relationship to the social sciences and humanities, and given its location at the heart of capitalist instrumentalism, is that there is not more exhaustion, more loss of hope. Could we then talk about law as a hopeful discipline? It depends on the definition of hope we adopt. Law is certainly not hopeful in the sense, described by Richard Swedberg, of a “wish for something to come true” (Chapter  1, this volume). Indeed, law’s ability to deliver on specific promises of social change has been famously described as “hollow hope” (Rosenberg 1991). If lawyers hope, they do not hope for something so concretely and

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instrumentally defined. As I have argued elsewhere, their knowledge is not oriented toward an outside target in that way, even when it purports to have a specific aim such as social change or economic growth or the rationalization of government resources in mind (Riles 2004).2 Law certainly is also not hopeful if we have in mind Jonathan Lear’s notion of “radical hope” (Lear 2006); there is nothing very radical about law at all. It is a much more mundane, ordinary technology than this. If we take Genda’s understanding of hope as an attribute or asset of persons, likewise, I doubt we can speak of law as hopeful since, as we will see, the “ability to go on” is understood as much as an attribute of the techniques of law itself as of the lawyers who deploy them. But if we adopt Miyazaki’s definition of hope as the “reorientation of knowledge” (2006: 149), described further below, I believe we gain a useful vocabulary for understanding the power of legal practice, as well as an agenda for replicating that power on other intellectual terrains. As it turns out, fiction is not something external to law, but a core device of law itself. Examples of legal fictions would be the treatment of the corporation as a person, or the common law doctrine of coverture, which held that at marriage a wife merged into the person of her husband. In the standard definition, a legal fiction is a factual statement a judge, a legal scholar, or a lawyer tells while simultaneously understanding full well—and also understanding that the audience understands—that the statement is not fact. As Lon Fuller put it, a legal fiction is “either (1) a statement propounded with a complete or partial consciousness of its falsity, or (2) a false statement recognized as having utility” (1930a: 369). A legal fiction is not a lie because “it is not intended to deceive”—it is known by all who use it to be false (367). It differs from a hypothesis for Fuller because there is no question of proving its truth.3 This also distinguishes a legal fiction from a legal presumption, which at least takes the form of a statement that can be rebutted.4 Some legal theorists now suggest that legal fictions, far from just helping to order social, political, or economic phenomena, actually constitute those phenomena by providing the frames through which social actors apprehend social realities. For example, Yan Thomas’s research into the techniques of legal fictions for managing inheritance funds in Roman law shows how “facts” such as whether there was a death, or indeed whether there was a corpse, were matters produced internally by legal argumentation, even as that argumentation itself turned on a divide between matters of fact and matters of law: “This power—the power to command the real while ostensi-

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bly breaking with it—governs in my understanding the comprehension we should have of the ancient ius civile” (Thomas 1995: 20; my translation). As Geoff rey Samuel puts it, “What is . . . interesting . . . is the extent to which models of traditional legal concepts act as schemes for constructing the objects of legal science” (2004: 46) He gives the example of categories such as “person,” “damage,” “thing,” and “fault,” which the law treats as facts, and which social actors treat as social categories, but which are actually legal categories. Samuel terms these categories “virtual facts” because “they are factual modes which transcend actual factual reality. Some kinds of damage may not amount to ‘damage,’ while some types of things may not amount to a ‘thing’ ” (47). In sum, “The idea that legal science is a discourse that has its object in actual factual situations is to misunderstand, fundamentally, legal thought. . . . [Law] functions as much within the world of fact as within the world of law and it is this dual role that endows it with its capacity to create virtual facts. Lawyers, like scientists, do not work directly on reality but construct rationalized models of this reality, and it is these models that become the ‘objects’ of legal discourse” (74). The debate about legal fictions in legal studies, then, is not so much about how to go on once what has long been assumed is lost, as in hope studies, but rather about how something comes to be assumed in the first place, and what the epistemological and political status of the assumption is. What are the techniques and sources of authority that bring those assumptions into existence and allow them to carry on, as they pass from one lawyer’s hands to another? What legal fictions help to bring to light, in other words, is the technical source of law’s agentive power. What this may contribute to the conversation about hope, in turn, is the ability to rephrase concerns about conditions of powerlessness under capitalism as a challenge to replicate the power of hope itself. Let me begin from a more straightforward place, however, with the question of the epistemological status of fiction in law and how it might speak to concerns about the overinstrumentalization of the capitalist world.

“As If ” Instruments The legal fiction has been the subject of a long-standing jurisprudential debate. Some ardently defend the legal fiction as the very engine of progress in

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the law. Sir Henry Maine, for example, celebrated the contributions of legal fictions to the evolution of law from Roman times to the present. For him, legal fictions were one of three key institutions, alongside courts of equity and legislatures, by which the law evolved in order to keep up with changes in society (Maine 1931).5 The legal fiction has had equally powerful adversaries. Jeremy Bentham, for example, considered it the very opposite of ethical, transparent government. In this view, the legal fiction is a device used by lawyers to pull the wool over everyone else’s eyes, on the way to furthering their own class interests. If lawyers wished to change the law, in his view, they should do so through their legislature, where the public has at least some degree of access, instead of with a lawyerly wink and a nod: “It has never been employed to any purpose but the affording a justification for something which other wise would be unjustifiable. . . . It affords presumptive and conclusive evidence of the mischievousness of the act of power in support of which it is employed. . . . In every case, and throughout the whole field of government, these instruments of mis-rule have had, as they could not but have had, for their fabricators, the fraternity of lawyers” (Bentham and Bowring 1843: 77–78). Bentham’s position has many contemporary advocates. The constitutional theorist Cass Sunstein, for example, has plainly argued that we need “principles, not fictions”—that legal fictions are “unhelpful and in fact harmful to legal reasoning and results. Fictions are not indispensable. The law would be better off without any of them” (1990: 1256). But for others, the fiction captures something paradigmatic about the nature of law itself. As the legal realist Jerome Frank put it, on his way to a critique of what he viewed as the dogmatism of legal formalism, “What, with unfortunately few exceptions, judges have failed to see is that, in a sense, all legal rules, principles, precepts, concepts, standards—all generalized statements of law—are fictions. In their application to any precise state of facts they must be taken with a lively sense of their unexpressed qualifications, of their purely ‘operational’ character. Used without awareness of their artificial character they become harmful dogmas” (Frank [1930] 1970: 179; emphasis in original). What is at stake in this debate over creativity versus obfuscation is a certain epistemological subtlety about the legal fiction. One early attempt to theorize the epistemological foundations of legal fictions, Hans Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of “As If ” ([1924] 2001), has inspired generations of legal theory.6 Vaihinger’s larger argument concerns the use of what he terms “as ifs,” in all  aspects of knowledge, from mathematics to economics to religion. An

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“as if ” in Vaihinger’s terms is knowledge that is consciously false, and hence for this very reason is irrefutable. Vaihinger draws attention to the delicate epistemological stance of the “as if ”—to its subtle, ambivalent “tension.” The “as if ” is neither true nor not true, he insists, but rather is itself the tension between what is true and not true. It is this tension, for Vaihinger, that is the fountain of all growth in knowledge: “The ‘As if ’ world, which is formed in this manner, the world of the ‘unreal’ is just as important as the world of the so-called real or actual (in the ordinary sense of the word); indeed it is far more important for ethics and aesthetics” (xlvii). Vaihinger calls for remaining open to what he terms the “as if ” quality of knowledge rather than critiquing its distance from reality: “We can only say that objective phenomena can be regarded as if they behaved in such and such a way, and there is absolutely no justification for assuming any dogmatic attitude and changing the ‘as if ’ into a ‘that’ ” (ibid., 81). If the problem hope studies responds to, then, is a condition in which the long-standing presumed bases of life and work to which social actors are committed—intellectual and otherwise—no longer hold, then the legal fiction represents a different kind of commitment in the first place, neither belief nor disbelief. After all, it is not a presumption but a fiction. And indeed, Vaihinger’s tarrying toward the subjunctive of knowledge makes him an ideal talismanic figure for humanistic attempts to dislodge certain kinds of empiricist claims in the social sciences. In this view, the world of the unreal is just as important, just as true, as the world of the real. For example, Edmund Leach, drawing on Vaihinger, indexed his own commitment to theoretical models that were admittedly “unreal” and “static” with the provocative phrase “as if ” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 23; Leach 1982), and the anthropologist Roy Wagner picked up on the phrase, and on Vaihinger’s work on the nature of analogy, as fiction, to refer to ethnography as a wider analogical task of seeing one thing as if it were another (Wagner 1986: 9).7 For social theorists, the “as if,” like the turn to hope, has been seen as a position that affords a certain pause from the instrumentalism of social analysis. Although I join those who embrace Vaihinger’s text for its hopeful reorientation of social scientific knowledge, there is a curious omission from these anti-instrumental readings of Vaihinger: For Vaihinger, the “as if,” or the fiction, is at its core always and only a means to an end: “Thought, then, must be regarded as a mechanism, as a machine, as an instrument in the service of life” (Vaihinger [1924] 2001: 5).8 It is on precisely this point, moreover, that lawyers have embraced Vaihinger. Vaihinger’s insight about the instrumental

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nature of subjunctive truths crystallizes a kind of common sense among lawyers: the particular character of the legal fiction as an assertion of what is understood always already to be false is that it is an explicit instrument, a device with a clearly defined purpose, a means to an end. For Maine, for example, legal fictions, as tools of particular judges working out individual cases, serve the larger social and historical purpose of legal reform. For Bentham, in a converse way, although legal fictions may advance the interests of individual litigants, the problem with legal fictions is not their epistemological status but rather the fact that they serve no larger social purpose: “[The fiction] has never been employed but to a bad purpose. It has never been employed to any purpose but the affording [of] a justification for something which other wise would be unjustifiable” (Bentham and Bowring 1843: 77). The two agree, in other words, on the purposeful quality of the fiction; they disagree only on whether the ends justify the means. Therefore, the fiction’s status as a relation of means to ends is central to lawyers’ own complicated and delicate epistemological and ethical commitments. Fuller focuses on the legal fiction’s tool-like quality when he argues that at least one purpose of the legal fiction is as technical abbreviation, a “convenient shorthand” (1930b: 517), a marker or placeholder for the points at which legal thought reaches the limits of its own capacities. When a judge adjudicating a dispute between divorcing spouses over how to treat frozen human embryos resolves to treat the embryos as “quasi-property,” for example, it is not so much to imagine them as actually part human and part property as to create a placeholder for the fact that we do not yet know how to imagine embryos, in relationship to existing legal categories of person and property, and to solve a practical dispute. The legal fiction is an instrument for getting over these kinds of humps—a tool for leapfrogging over our own conceptual limitations, Fuller argues. Nomi Stolzenberg, drawing on psychoanalytic theory, updates Fuller by presenting the legal fiction as a tool for dealing with anxiety surrounding the inherent uncertainty in the world (her example is uncertainty about paternity) by foreclosing factual inquiry (2007). So the first contribution of a study of legal fictions to hope studies might be to redirect our attention away from efforts to escape capitalist instrumentalism and toward the hopeful quality of instrumentalism itself. And indeed, if the “as if ” is something akin to hope, there is evidence that it pervades the very capitalist institutions that some take as the source of global hopelessness. As one of the grandfathers of international economic law long ago insisted, the international economic order is an “as if ” economic order

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(Röpke 1954). Legal actors who participate in the global fi nancial markets must also be their proponents, for private governance is understood by its proponents to be a fragile project. The ultimate concern of international economic law is how to build an “economic order”—it does not “exist” at the outset. As Hannoun points out, the proliferation of fictions of all kinds in economic law is particularly interesting because this is a field in which, according to its own ideology, the law should mirror reality (1995: 84). In fact, Hannoun argues, the legal fictions of economic law show less concern with the adequation of law and reality than with intervening technically in economic realities to achieve certain objectives.9 In other words, economic law is less concerned with mirroring reality than it seems. What the legal fictions of international economic law foreground in Hannoun’s terms are not economic “realities” but the effects of legal practice (“effets de la pratique”) (93). The “as if ” quality of global capitalism, moreover, depends on the “as if ” quality of legal knowledge.

Reorienting Legal Knowledge But the motivation for this chapter is the implications of Miyazaki’s idiosyncratic definition of hope for an understanding of legal knowledge. In his argument, every kind of knowledge has what he terms a “directionality.” Social actors’ implicit or explicit appreciation of the directionality of their knowledge leads them in turn to seek to “reorient” it, and this ability to see the potential for reorientation in one’s knowledge is what Miyazaki terms “hope” (whether it is hopeful or not in the commonsense understanding of the term) (Miyazaki 2004). For example, the shared directionality of financial analysis for the traders he studied was the directionality of economic time, in which actions in the present dictate the future, and actors are constantly oriented toward predicting the future, but the future cannot ultimately be known until it is too late, that is, it has become the present.10 Miyazaki describes how the trading team leader’s constant contemplation of the temporal directionality of market analysis led him to entertain a somewhat bizarre fantasy of creating a trading machine that could accurately predict market movements into the future and hence replace human analysis altogether. In Miyazaki’s definition, this surreal dream is “hopeful” (even if in a commonsense notion it is perhaps only bizarre) because, having become aware of the directionality

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of time in trading analysis, in which the future is constantly speculated on from the point of view of the present, it entertains the possibility of reversing that direction and reimagines the present from the point of view of the future end of speculative trading altogether (2006). Of course this machine never came to be: Miyazaki argues that hope in the end is always disappointed (2004: 22), but this very disappointment is in turn the engine of further hope, as it leads to further reversals. Hence any act of hope is in fact always a replication of some other prior act of hope, elsewhere, on another analytical terrain (2004). This technical definition of hope I think provides a useful vocabulary for explicating the internal workings of the legal fiction, as it passes from the hands of one practitioner to the next. Consider for example what happens when a friendly critic of the “as if,” the eminent American legal realist Morris Cohen, manages to reverse its logic. Cohen’s article “On the Logic of Fiction” (1923)11 marks the emergence in the early twentieth century of a modernist approach to the legal fiction. Cohen begins by attacking the “positivistic bias” in Aristotelian logic that values “facts” (477) and treats relations between facts as artifice. He contrasts this view with what he terms the “modern relational view,” in which “a complex of things-in-relation is the subject-matter of science” (483). From this point of view, Cohen raises an objection to Vaihinger’s definition of a fiction as a statement that is false but nevertheless useful. The objection is that such a statement assumes that there are facts in the world—true facts and false facts—rather than analytical relations. The ultimate problem with Vaihinger’s understanding of legal fictions, from Cohen’s point of view, is that the fiction— the analytical relation that is also a judgment or legal resolution—is treated as the opposite of fact. A fiction such as √–1, for example, is not simply “false but useful”; it does exist in the world, if one accepts that “besides things and their qualities,” the world includes also “relations and processes between them,” Cohen argues (486). In my view, the contribution of Cohen’s article to our understanding of legal fictions—and more generally to a modernist conception of law—inheres in the kinds of reversals that Miyazaki wishes to capture with the term “hope.” Like the trader studied by Miyazaki, Cohen has a feel for the directionality of the centuries-long debate about legal fictions in the law: He is aware, implicitly or explicitly, that the question of the epistemological status of the legal fiction—is a statement such as “A corporation is a person” true or

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false?—turns on another question, the question of political agency in law— is the answer to a legal question found, or made? In Cohen’s time, this latter question would have been highly charged, as the legal realist movement in which he was a core figure worked hard to demonstrate that the law was not simply a system of discovered logic but an artifact of judging, and hence judicial decisions invalidating workers’ rights legislation, for example, were matters of political choice. From this realist perspective, whatever one might think of them, legal fictions were artifacts of judicial power. In an article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1893, for example, Oliver Mitchell argued that “judicial fictions are, in truth, but the hand-maidens of the only true judicial power,— that of decision” (Mitchell 1893: 252), and as such were “but a species of a much larger class of legal devices, which have been rendered necessary by the unacknowledged character of the power of legislation exercised by the judges, which, as a necessary consequence, entailed a resort to this principle of fiction” (261). To summarize, “A legal fiction is a device which attempts to conceal the fact that a judicial decision is not in harmony with the existing law. The only use and purpose, upon the last analysis, of any legal fiction is to nominally conceal this fact that the law has undergone a change at the hands of the judges” (262). Mitchell himself was a proponent of legal fictions and, unlike Bentham, intended these observations as complement, rather than criticism. Cohen himself subscribed fi rmly to this understanding of the legal fiction, and indeed all of legal reasoning, as political artifact. Some fictions could be characterized rather as euphemisms, he argues—ways of avoiding explicitly stating the “disagreeable truth” that “judges are not merely umpires but also make the law” (1923: 482). But where others saw in Vaihinger’s claim that legal fictions are neither true nor untrue an opportunity to champion the claim that the law is therefore nothing but a political artifact, it is precisely here that Cohen finds Vaihinger’s approach inadequate. For Cohen, Vaihinger’s excessively positivistic distinction between reality and fiction makes it impossible to fully appreciate the legal fiction as a political act, an act of decision and not just an act of description: “It would be absurd to regard these fictions as false propositions. They are rather resolutions to extend certain legal rights” (ibid.). Abstractions (metaphors or fictions—those things Vaihinger opposes to fact), then, are “methodologic resolutions, or determinations to look at objects in certain ways” (483). Take, for example, the fiction

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of the Hobbesian social contract as a justification for initial allocations of rights and duties in society: “It is . . . a great error to think that you can refute any of the older natural-law theories by denying that the social contract with which they began ever took place. The social contract is really not an hypothesis as to what actually happened, but a concept of social transformation” (487–88). For Cohen, then, two strands in modernist legal debate are intertwined— the question of the epistemological status of law leans on the question of the political status of law and vice versa. He grasps the directionality of the argument, in Miyazaki’s terms—the way that each strand can serve as a kind of foundation or support for the other. For example, Vaihinger’s seductive epistemological flexibility of “as if ” (as laudable as it is) is propped up by a fairly rigid notion of political agency: the problematization of the distinction between what is real and what is artifice, between what is truth and what is fiction in Vaihinger’s account is achieved at the expense of simplifying the difference between what is found and what is made and treating the law simply as a man-made tool, an artifact of human agency, an instrument. But what is interesting is what happens next. Following Cohen’s awareness of the directionality of this debate—of the way a claim about epistemology leans on a claim about the agency of the judge—he suddenly reverses his own analysis to make a surprising claim about the agency of law: Vaihinger claims that fictions are made; they are the artifacts of creative intellectual work, he says. But Cohen asks, “Did the Romans find or invent their legal system?” (1923: 484). He says, “We always speak of fi nding the solution to all sorts of problems and even great mechanical inventors testify that they fi nd their inventions, that the sought-for-device sometimes ‘flashes upon them,’ and most often they ‘stumble upon it’ while looking for something else” (484–85). This statement would have sounded like a scandal to Cohen’s realist colleagues bent on demonstrating that it is the judge, and not the law, that has agency in legal decisions, and it probably would have surprised even Cohen himself. Cohen’s attention to the dichotomy between what is found and what is made in the law then suggests a different point of engagement between legal studies and hope studies, around the question of the conditions for the abeyance of legal agency. Just as in Miyazaki’s analysis hope can inhere in the way it is possible momentarily to grasp how someone else’s agency can be the cause of one’s actions (Miyazaki 2004), Cohen asks us to query whether even within the context of an argument for the political quality of law, we

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might also acknowledge the way that at particular moments legal knowledge runs away from the knower, and becomes more than a tool in human hands.

A Double “As If ” But note where Cohen’s surprising claim comes from: it is achieved simply by working the standard, long-standing connection between the reality or artificiality of law and the given or artifactual quality of law in reverse. That is, Cohen reverses Vaihinger’s logic of a subjunctive epistemology propped against a standard understanding of legal agency by giving us a more subjunctive approach to legal agency propped against what was by that time the standard modernist epistemology (the notion that relations are as real as the “things” they relate). The ability to see one’s own agency in abeyance, then, is here the effect of a very specific kind of move, the ability to turn the analysis around, or inside out (Riles 2000), in order to grasp another possibility that is not external but internal to the legal form itself. Note that this feat is achieved in Cohen’s article largely as a matter of intuitive lawyerly skill—it is just what good lawyers do, just as, for the traders Miyazaki studied, turning financial knowledge around to see in it other possibilities is what good traders do. In fact I want to take this a step further to suggest that this kind of reversal is best understood as a routinized aspect of the usage of the legal fiction, what a legal fiction, as a knowledge practice, is. We can see this most clearly if we specify the standard definition of a legal fiction quoted at the outset in the following way: a legal fiction is not just any false statement understood by all to be false; it must take a particular form. When a judge asserts that at marriage the wife merges into the person of her husband, for example, or that the corporation is a person, the judge makes a legal conclusion, as Cohen points out—the conclusion that the woman loses control over her property, or that the corporation can enter into contracts or be held liable for torts. But this conclusion is presented as if it were a factual claim: the wife is part of her husband; the corporation is a person. A legal fiction is a legal conclusion—an act of judgment—that takes the form of a factual statement: it is a theory presented as if it were a fact. What we have then is a double “as if ”: the “as if ” of fact (the subjunctive assertion of a factual claim that is known to be false—the woman merges into her husband) turns on the “as if ” relationship of judgment to fact itself—the legal conclusion that takes the form of a fact. And here we have the trick of the device, for if the legal conclusion

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takes the form of a fact, the fact, which is known by all to be false, also becomes, in a sense, by operation of law, true: What else does it mean to say that a corporation is a person than that a judge has drawn an analogy between the qualities of the legal rights and obligations of the particular corporate entities in the dispute before him or her and those of archetypal rights and obligations bearers—natural persons? The remarkable agentive power of the legal fiction commented on by contemporary legal theorists, then, is not simply an artifact of the device’s epistemological complexity. Rather, the power of the device inheres in the way it reorients a question of agency by pairing it with a question of epistemology. It redirects attention from the question of “Who shall decide, and how shall she decide?” to a question of “Is the legal statement true or false?” From this point of view we might more accurately describe the legal fiction as a technique of reorientation, that is, of hope, in Miyazaki’s terms.

Replicating the Power of the Legal Fiction Now it would be possible to rephrase the observations above in a modality of critique. Indeed, the propensity to make the political nature of law disappear into a forest of complex technical and epistemological arguments is precisely what critical legal theorists mean when they refer to the “enchantment” of legal reasoning (Schlag 1998). In this view, legal reasoning obfuscates the simple truth: power lies outside, and not within, legal form. And it is on this academic terrain that we find the most interesting parallel between legal studies and hope studies, because these critiques of law’s enchantment participate in the same social theory debates described as in crisis by Hage, Miyazaki, and others. These legal critiques, for not wholly unrelated reasons, have suffered similar exhaustion. As in hope studies, critical legal scholars now are asking, what should be the attitude of the sophisticated observer of law after the failure of critique? The question here is, essentially, can the (conservative) “hope” of law be replicated on a (progressive) critical terrain? To date, the resounding answer to this question has been no. For example, the legal theorist Pierre Schlag (1998) has critiqued what he terms “ ‘as if ’ jurisprudence” (109)—what he describes as a sophisticated modern view of law, cognizant of all the epistemological and political critiques, in which “when doctrines are said to bind or rights to trump, this means only that the doctrines are to be understood as if they were binding and that rights are to be

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understood as if they trumped other claims” (110). Schlag explains, “The ambition of the sophisticated legal thinkers [who deploy as if legal reasoning] (and it is not a small one) is to avoid the naïve metaphysics of objectivism and subjectivism while nonetheless retaining the frame and force of these metaphysics” (112). Schlag concludes that legal analysis, so understood, suffers “a certain authority deficit” (112): “If, as a result of contemporary antimetaphysical scruples, entities such as principles, doctrines, values, rights are stripped of their subjective powers, then their prior subjective power must be relocated elsewhere for law to retain its authority. The question is where?” (111). He offers an analogy to explain why this approach is ultimately doomed to fail: What if the pope were to state explicitly that angels do not exist, but that this is just an “as if ” discourse? he asks. This would leave the faithful unsatisfied. “Once the metaphysical illusion is gone, the pope’s authority dissipates as well. The same thing goes for law” (112). Schlag’s point is that “as if ” jurisprudence is either jurisprudence without power or authority, or it is a continuation of the same old politics of mystification, that is, submission to legal form. If the “as if ” jurisprudence is powerful, for Schlag, it is simply because it is a clever way of reinstituting a belief in what is no longer believable; simply “the continuation of the same old metaphysics by other means” (114). For example, the repetition of statements such as “the corporation is a person,” even in a semi-ironic tone, perhaps makes other moves to extend the powers of corporations, such as giving them free speech rights, seem more politically palatable and logically defensible than it would be other wise. I want to query Schlag’s skepticism about “as if ” jurisprudence, or what I would term the replication of the very hope critiqued as mystification or enchantment, on one’s own critical terrain, from one par ticu lar vantage point. My interest is in the picture he presents of legal knowledge as a product, produced by some and consumed by others, and in which power inheres in the production. As the discussion of debates in legal theory summarized above suggests, legal scholars routinely direct their attention, positive and negative, to the inventors of legal fictions. Perhaps commentators, who also fancy themselves to be original creators of new ideas, identify most readily with this image of the creative judge, commentator, or legislator. But is this a satisfactory account of the workings of legal knowledge? Consider for example one of the pinnacles of modern American property law, a doctrine known as the implied warranty of habitability. Th is

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doctrine in fact only dates to the 1970s. Prior to this point, if tenants did not explicitly contract for rental property to be maintained up to a minimum level of safety, they had no recourse against their landlord and remained liable for rent even if they fled the uninhabitable property. The traditional account of the doctrine is as follows. Faced with a question of how to hold the landlord responsible for maintaining a level of safety he or she did not covenant to maintain in the lease, progressive judges responded by inventing a legal fiction of an “implied warranty” under which it was deemed to be as if the landlord and tenant had inserted a promise to maintain the apartment in safe condition into the lease. In the law of property, this invention is imagined alternatively as the heroic or maniacal action (depending on one’s political persuasion) of a handful of judges who, in a singular set of politically charged decisions, forever changed the law. But although the invention of new legal doctrines is one exciting location of legal fictions, it is not by any means the most common. This focus on the judge as producer of legal fictions misrepresents legal practice and, in my view, both overstates the political agency of judges and fails to give us a full account of the agentive power of law. Let me make this more concrete with an example of how this fiction passes from the hands of teacher to student. When I teach a doctrine like the implied warranty for the first time to new law students, they fight hard against the concept of “constructive intent”—how can it be, they argue, that a judge can simply, by the stroke of a pen, state that the landlord intended something that all parties know the landlord did not intend? It is an important part of my job, as a trainer of novices, to fight the students to an “expert” understanding of the legal fiction as a subjunctive modality of expression. But the next time the class encounters a doctrine of this kind—say, when the students learn the doctrine of adverse possession under which one person’s occupation of another person’s land for a given period of time without sufficient resistance from the true owner will cause title to shift to the occupier—I need only say, “constructive intent,” and the students have got it: they type the phrase into their notes and move on. The creativity, the second time around, is neither mine nor the students. In fact, there is no creativity at all. What there is, instead, is the agentive power of the act of replication, as the device becomes the students’ as much as the teacher’s, and the students, thinking now “like a lawyer,” also come to belong to the device: the legal fiction works in a thin, shorthand, technical way, to obviate (in Wagner’s terms) or leapfrog over (in Fuller’s terms) the need for political conflict between novice and expert or between proponent and critic of housing law reform.

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What is ignored in the standard account of the development of American housing law, in which one act of judging forever changes the law, is the afterlife of the fiction, after its initial creation—the work of the implied warranty of habitability as it is passed from legal hand to legal hand, dissected in law review articles, invoked in the briefs of countless housing lawyers, debated by generations of law students, in the decades after the landmark case that brought it into existence. This practice cannot adequately be captured by a view of legal knowledge as produced by some and consumed by others. We should rather say that legal knowledge comes into agentive being in the process of its being handed from one legal actor to another, and in that process it comes to constitute the very actors that deploy it. One of Schlag’s concerns is that “as if ” jurisprudence unwittingly reinforces a naive view of legal truth. But note that in this example what matters is really not what the teacher and the students believe to be the truth about the terms of the contract. What matters, rather, is the practice, the move, the replication. Schlag errs, in other words, when he critiques the instability of “as if ” jurisprudence as if it were a truth claim, a theory. As Thomas points out, a legal fiction is not theory (“la pensée juridique”) but legal technique (“la technique du droit”), its own way of doing things (“sa manière de faire”) (1995: 18). The truth value of the legal fiction is not simply ambiguous or subjunctive; it is actually quite irrelevant. So where lies the authority of the legal fiction? Is it simply a tool of other external interests, such as housing reform, or the academic stature of the legal theorist, or the authority of the teacher? In fact, the purposes for the creation of the legal fiction recede from view as students replicate the practice. Vaihinger terms this phenomenon “the law of the preponderance of the means over the ends” ([1924] 2001: xxx). He argues that in all aspects of human thought, in the course of the use of “as if ” devices as means to particular conceptual ends, the ends begin to recede from view as those who use the tool come to focus rather on the means. In the example of the classroom discussion described above, for example, the first and most difficult discussion of constructive intent focused on the social, political, and economic goals for having such a doctrine; the second, third, and fourth discussions focused only on the applicability of the doctrine of constructive intent itself. If by power we mean, among other things, the ability to go on, then the power of law inheres in the reception and replications it calls forth, as it passes from one set of legal hands to another. There is no authority deficit here because power is not a zero sum game. The replication, as experienced

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by the students, is both empowered and empowering. I would like to claim this power as a definition of hope, a reason for which we might say that the technical legal fiction is hopeful. If the legal fiction is hopeful, then hope is power. From this perspective, the objective might become not simply to document the hopelessness of the powerless, but to replicate the power of hope. The question then becomes, can legal authority be apprehended in any other modality than either blind submission or critique? Miyazaki argues that hope cannot be analyzed. It can only be “replicated on another terrain” of scholarship (2004: 25). Hence for him there is no critical study of hope; there is only hopeful scholarship, that is, hope that replicates its subjects’ hope through its own reversals of the directionality of academic knowledge. In this chapter, I have sought to engage in such an act of replication by reversing the directionality of critiques of law.

Notes I thank Hirokazu Miyazaki for his assistance with this chapter and for his hope, dimly replicated here. I also thank Simon Stern, Richard Swedberg, Iwao Sato, and audiences at the International Hope Studies Conference convened by the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, December 2007, the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, May 2008, the School of Criticism and Theory in July 2014, and McGill University’s Anthropology Speaker Series in February 2014 for comments that substantially shaped the direction of the chapter. 1. For a discussion of freeters and freeterism, see Genda (in this volume) and Kasuga 2007. 2. Drawing on my analysis of legal knowledge, Miyazaki has argued (against Swedberg in my view) that in any case such “hope in a predetermined end occludes hope in the means” (2005: 289–90). 3. In this respect, a legal fiction also differs from the ideal typic models of Weberian social science, in which the very point of the convention is to open up further inventive possibilities—further challenges, modifications, critiques, or empirical tests. A legal fiction differs from what social theorists term ideology also, since ideology is effective only if it is taken as a true statement by at least some political actors. 4. As Yan Thomas puts it, La présomption intègre l’imperfection de la connaissance humaine, le droit revêtant alors d’une apparence de certitude un probable qui ne peut être éternellement débattu. La fiction procède d’une démarche résolument contraire, même si les résultats auxquels elle conduit sont

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parfois empiriquement comparables. Elle ne se contente pas de mettre un terme à la recherche du vrai: c’est cette recherche même que, d’emblée, elle répudie. La fiction est une négation du vrai manifeste; elle transgresse, pour le fonder autrement, l’ordre même de la nature des choses. . . . Avec la fiction, nous sommes en présence du mystère le plus radicalement étranger à la pensée commune qu’off re, non pas la pensée juridique, mais plus précisement la technique du droit, sa manière de faire, l’ars iuris. (1995: 18) For a contrasting view of the legal fiction as essentially identical to the legal presumption, see Stolzenberg 2007. 5. For example, the legal fiction of adoption allowed Roman citizens to incorporate foreigners into their communities while preserving the premise that kinship defi ned political allegiances. Fictions “satisfy the desire for improvement, which is not quite wanting, at the same time that they do not offend the superstitious disrelish for change that is always present,” Maine argued. Without legal fictions, in other words, the law would stagnate—and hence would hold society back by refusing to recognize in law changes long since recognized in society (1931: 22). 6. Fuller enthusiastically embraced Vaihinger as the greatest of all thinkers about the nature of legal fictions, and devoted the better part of his canonical work on legal fictions to a straightforward summary and explication of Vaihinger’s text: “I am firmly convinced that a study of Vaihinger will make one a better legal thinker” (1930c 880n177). Hans Kelsen, likewise, drew heavi ly on Vaihinger in his own work on legal fictions, and Frank read Vaihinger (in a highly enthusiastic but fairly flat-footed way) to support his own view that the law was full of “conceptual distortion” (Frank [1930] 1970: 342; see also Lichtman 1930–31). 7. This could include not simply the “as if ” models of anthropological theory, but the “as if ” nature of the ethnographic project itself in which ethnography becomes “a relative perspective within the province of cultural construction, taking the referentialism of the symbol, the ‘is’ of convention, as a kind of subjunctive, is to enter a tentative suspension—Vaihinger’s world of ‘as if ’ ” (Wagner 1986: 9). 8. The fiction is, in effect, only an elaboration or perfection of the larger instrumental quality of all knowledge: “Thought is bent on continually perfecting itself and thus becomes a more and more ser viceable tool. For this purpose it expanded its province by inventing instruments, like other natural activities. . . . The natural function of thought, which we spoke of above as a tool, also expands its instrumentality by the invention of tools, means of thought, instruments of thought, one of which is [the fiction]” (Wagner 2001: 6). It is this emphasis on the instrumental, purposive quality of the “as if ” that distinguishes Vaihinger’s work from the Kantian tradition and has led some to view him as a kind of pragmatist: “It must be remembered that the object of the world of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality—that would be an utterly impossible task—but rather to provide us with an instrument for finding our way about more easily in this world” (Vaihinger [1924] 2001: 15; emphasis in original).

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9. “Les fictions intellectuelles ne sont donc pas absentes du droit économique; outre la diversité de leurs sources, leur usage donne toutefois un contenu particulier au réalisme économique qui, au-delà de la recherche affi rmée de l’adéquation du droit au fait, se révèle également soucieux d’efficacité technique pour la réalisation des buts poursuivis . . . l’effet d’un interventionnisme juridique créatif destiné à informer la réalité, voire à la heurter, en fonction de ses objectifs” (Hannoun 1995: 90). 10. For example, he describes a debate between the financial traders he studied over whether traders would be best rewarded or punished as a group for the successes or failures of the team as a whole. This debate turned on yet another debate about whether the gains or losses associated with trading should be reckoned on a short- or long-term time horizon—if one took a short-term view, one supported individualized incentives, while if one took a long-term view, one supported collective incentives. 11. Cohen writes here for a philosophy audience about the nature of “fiction.” He refers only in passing to legal fictions, although it is clear that the argument is animated by his work on property, contract, and legal philosophy.

References Bentham, Jeremy, and John Bowring. 1843. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Vol. 9. Edinburgh: W. Tait, Simpkin, Marshall. Cohen, Morris  R. 1923. “On the Logic of Fiction.” Journal of Philosophy 20(18): 477–88. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview. Frank, Jerome. (1930) 1970. Law and the Modern Mind. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. Friedman, Lawrence. 1973. A History of American Law. New York: Simon and Schuster. Fuller, Lon L. 1930a. “Legal Fictions.” Illinois Law Review 25(4): 363–99. ———. 1930b. “Legal Fictions Part II.” Illinois Law Review 25(4): 513–46. ———. 1930c. “Legal Fictions Part III.” Illinois Law Review 25(4): 877–910. Genda, Yuji. 2005. A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity: The New Reality Facing Japanese Youth. Trans. J. Hoff. Tokyo: International House of Japan. Hage, Ghassan. 2003. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale, NSW: Pluto. Hannoun, Charley. 1995. “Les fictions en droit économique.” Droits 21: 83–93. Horwitz, Morton. 1993. American Legal Realism. New York: Oxford University Press. Kasuga, Naoki. 2005. “Law Creators or Law Discoverers? Japa nese Crime Novels Today.” Paper delivered to Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture, Cornell University, April 4.

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———. 2007. “Okure” no shiko: Posuto-kindai wo ikiru [Delayed mind: Staying in the postmodern]. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. Kennedy, Duncan. 1997. A Critique of Adjudication: Fin de Siècle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leach, Edmund R. 1982. Social Anthropology. New York: Oxford University Press. Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lichtman, Mark M. 1930–31. “Four Modern Philosophies and Their Application to Law.” Temple Law Quarterly 5: 215–34. Maine, Henry Sumner. 1931. Ancient Law. London: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, Oliver R. 1893. “The Fictions of the Law: Have They Proved Useful or Detrimental to Its Growth?” Harvard Law Review 7(5): 249–65. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. “From Sugar Cane to ‘Swords’: Hope and the Extensibility of the Gift in Fiji.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11(2): 277–95. ———. 2006. “Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques.” Cultural Anthropology 21(2): 147–72. Murakami, Ryu. (2000) 2002. Kibo no kuni no ekusodasu [Exodus in a country of hope]. Tokyo: Bungeishunju. Riles, Annelise. 2000. Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2004. “Property as Legal Knowledge: Means and Ends.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 10: 775–95. Röpke, William K. 1954. “Economic Order and International Law.” Receuil des Cours 86: 203. Rosenberg, Gerald. 1991. The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Samuel, Geoff rey. 2004. “Epistemology and Comparative Law: Contributions from the Sciences and Social Sciences.” In Epistemology and Methodology of Comparative Law, ed. Mark van Hoecke, 35–77. Oxford: Hart. Schlag, Pierre. 1995. Laying Down the Law: Mysticism, Fetshism, and the American Legal Mind. New York: New York University Press. ———. 1998. The Enchantment of Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stolzenberg, Nomi  M. 2007. “Anti-anxiety Law: Winnicott and the Legal Fiction of Paternity.” American Imago 64(3): 339–79. Sunstein, Cass. 1990. “Principles, Not Fictions.” University of Chicago Law Review 57: 1247–58. Thomas, Yan. 1995. “Fictio legis: L’empire de la fiction romaine et ses limites medievales.” Droits 21: 17–63. Unger, Roberto. 1986. The Critical Legal Studies Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Vaihinger, Hans. (1924) 2001. The Philosophy of “As If ”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge. Wagner, Roy. 1986. Symbols Th at Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. An Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 6

When and How Does Hope Spring Eternal in Personal and Popular Economics? Thoughts from West Africa to America Jane I. Guyer

The Mystery of “Resilience” in West Africa The sense of a persistent economic crisis in Africa gathered momentum in the late 1970s, after ten to fifteen turbulent years of independence and fiveyear development plans. It was around this time that the term “resilience” began to appear in the contentious literature on peasantries. The economic history literature started to discuss “external shocks” in the “open economy” (see, e.g., Hopkins 1973); Chayanovian (1966) theory offered a way to understand a household dynamic of shift ing rates and processes of “selfexploitation”; and an extension of the Geertz/Goldenweiser notion of “involution” (Geertz 1963)—the capacity of a basic pattern to absorb more and more complexities and embellishments—met with Keith Hart’s (1973) concept of expanding “informal sector” employment. Scholars were groping for systematic ways of understanding how “life went on,” but not as “tradition.” Indeed, it was often those who seemed least traditional in the anthropological sense of that time (keeping their ancestral ways of life) who were most buoyantly surfing the storms of change in their own ways, quite differently from the formal sector that was—conceptually at least—equated with “modernity.” This was all a little earlier than the emergence of artisanal diamond mining and extralegal trading networks, advance fee fraud, new

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witchcraft practices, and many other phenomena that permanently obliterated the binary conceptual opposition between “tradition” and “modernity” (see Geschiere 1997). On the eve of these shifts, it seemed that if the classic dynamic concepts of that time—resilience, informal economy, household cycles—could just be qualified by allusion to the highly differential “ownership of the means of production” in the global economy, they might offer a certain generalizable vocabulary for the perception that things were not “the same” but neither did they utterly fall apart for populations in Nigeria and Ghana (for example), even under increasingly adverse conditions. In the events of the post-1989 world, this theoretical patchwork was not only somehow incomplete but its sutures were increasingly strained by experience. Some developments went much worse than had been anticipated, as post–Cold War conflicts broke out. And others went surprisingly better. My own benchmark for surprising success was “feeding cities”: in Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s, cities of five or more million people were fed from functioning markets even when there were petrol shortages and when vehicle repairs were made by applying improvisation to cannibalized spare parts; when money had been taken out of circulation by “mopping up” campaigns by a politicized Central Bank; and when urban water and electricity (essential for all food processing) were supplied only very intermittently. Yes, there were sparks of intense violence that made it seem as if law and order were pervasively unraveling; yes, people looked to otherworldly satisfactions in ever more imaginative religious movements; yes, the get-rich-quick schemes were stunning in their boldness; and yes, the national military leadership penetrated deeply into society with their intricate politics of personal clientage, “settlement” tactics, and selective assassination. And yet, and partly through new loopholes that crisis itself opened up, people also kept ancient vehicles going on deeply rutted roads, figured out systems for getting their merchandise around the increasing number of police checkpoints, innovated in cassava processing, created new credit instruments, and founded an entire new indigenous-language entertainment industry, the video boom in “Nollywood” (see articles in Guyer, Denzer, and Agbaje 2002). In the twentyfirst century, Lagos has the largest electronics market in West Africa, most of it in the informal sector (Koolhaas 2000). Such a daily devotion to “life goes on” should not be reified as a cultural attribute, but neither should diffidence or skepticism cancel out the repeated perceptions and even survey findings of a certain positive orientation to the near future. Africa hardly ever experiences Gallup polls. The one major

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exception is the inclusion of Africans in the survey of fift y thousand respondents from all over the world who are asked questions such as whether next year will better than this year. The result? That in spite of all the well-known troubles of the continent, “Africans are the most optimistic people” and “Africa has topped that scale for years” (Polgreen 2006: 4). Nigerian political scientist Kayode Fayemi commented in terms I will return to: “If I put on my academic hat, I would have nothing to tell you to explain this. . . . The only thing keeping people going is hope and optimism about the future that is unknown. . . . I think that is the only way to explain optimism, because you can’t base it on any analysis of our current condition.” And again: “At the heart of this seeming contradiction is a paradox—a surfeit of misery met not with stoicism but with unshakeable faith in an unknown future” (ibid.). The current American view of Africa has shifted 180 degrees, from the resilience that scholars noted in the 1970s and 1980s to a perception of rampant chaos. Africans dispute it. On March 29, 2006, the organization Friends of Nigeria answered a negative editorial by taking out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times under the heading “NIGERIA: Things are NOT Falling Apart”: “Nigerians have taken a leap of faith with the President and are working hard to make Nigeria great again” (A5). However transparent the self-interest on both sides of the image-making battle, the terms of the engagement are oriented toward a markedly open vista on the future. If we are to look at, and try to understand, “hope” itself, as well as use hope as a method, we cannot afford to dismiss what people say of themselves year after year. I am not trying to restore “resilience,” and above all, I am not blind to the dangers of creating a highly questionable “object” of study. Rather I am holding open the analytical space to explore how specific processes move forward through time, and how such specificities might be “aggregated” into broader shared orientations to the world and the future.

A “Method of Hope”: Experience and Orientation When “Hope Springs Eternal” Working with a concept such as hope, which has so many and such powerful referents, one has to be very wary of methodological travesties in analysis. How does the case, the statistic, the flashpoint of violence, or the good deed or prayer (for the faithful) “add up” to anything more encompassing, let alone a phenomenon as difficult to define as hope? In my book Marginal

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Gains (Guyer 2004), I explored the idea that, as long as one’s logic of extrapolation was transparent enough to be contested, one could infer enduring patterns with arguably formal characteristics from the recurrence, in many varied contexts and with varied content, of certain conceptualizations and enactments. For the purpose of pattern recognition with respect to the working of equivalence and asymmetry in transactions, I consigned their temporal processes of accruing over time to the background. But of course, recurrence through time is not a simple additional series, like beads on a string. As Gilles Deleuze drew to central focus, difference and repetition coexist. And practice theory would suggest that successive enactments cultivate qualities that invest each one with novel senses of meaning and effectivity. Hirokazu Miyazaki’s (2004) book demands that I now foreground recurrent characteristics of people’s orientation to time in their transactional lives. This at least gets closer to one of the key qualities of “resilience,” namely the internal form given to the passage of time. Only after building the case in all its specificity may one project these properties onto the big screen: of the future, of collective life, of the social imagination, and of disciplinary interpretation. On the face of it, nowhere would seem to deserve a “method of hope” more than Africa. And perhaps nowhere is there such fertile and varied material to work with, which might in turn modify the method. The empirical material for this chapter is not original to me and was not collected with hope in mind. My contribution is to think about how the place and the method might speak to each other, for better understanding of both. So I need first to review what I take from Miyazaki’s argument about what a method of hope would be. He insists on a temporal understanding of ritual that replicates the actors’ sense of living through it rather than the analyst’s sense of observing given stages. The three-step process of ritual is not the structuralist separation-liminality-reintegration of Arnold Van Gennep ([1913] 1960) and (the early) Victor Turner (1974), but the action-abeyanceresolution of experience. The concept of a moment of abeyance is the most innovative of Miyazaki’s reconfigurations of the structuralist model. Abeyance is not necessarily experienced as transitional or liminal. In a state and duration of abeyance the actors express the most profound of their senses of the meaning of the entire performance, that is, their anticipation that there is a beneficent agency in the world that lies beyond and between the parties to the ritual and that inhabits the moments of their interaction. Any specific resolution is left to that agency to create and to the participants to recognize. That attitude of anticipation is based on experience of past anticipations

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and resolutions, hence on a kind of extrapolation at the heart of repetition and not at its endpoint: not the same each time, but perceived as having some similar properties and evoking the same tropic orientation of imagination and emotion. What is lifted off here is any sense that the resolution itself is reconstitutive. It could be strikingly innovative. Miyazaki is focusing our attention on the temporality, the cognitive attributes and the affect of anticipation. The idea of a temporal space, where a certain creative intervention is made, resonates well both with the idea of resilience (“coming back repetitively”; “rebounding”) and with several ethnographic sources on West Africa. It is worth reviewing the concepts that these works have used, in order to pinpoint exactly where the method of hope would add to our acuity on what is clearly both a crucial process and a difficult conceptual challenge. Two sources of critical skepticism demand attention first. One is the theory of agency that anticipation seems to comprise. One must ask how widely one can cast the net: including the agency of aggregates, contingent events, things (as in actor network theory), or the divine or diabolic interventions to which actors themselves would channel all responsibility. The other is the theoretical basis for aggregation of hopeful processes, as seen either from a central position within them or from another angle. If an argument is to be made about processes of reproduction and even growth on the basis of “resilient” social dynamics, then not only will it have to be theoretically elegant and empirically supported but—in our own case in African studies—it will have to stand up to the counterargument that all this is actually just another way of falling apart: just imperceptibly slowly instead of catastrophically. Although microattention to anticipation in instances of hope would seem to negate any attempt to project trends or scenarios that might result from aggregated resolutions, people themselves are rarely without some kind of larger vista on the future. Indeed, religious people often have a detailed temporal map of where things are supposed to go, from which they “diagnose” a specific situation in the present that calls forth their attention to hopefulness. So “trends” cannot be occluded altogether.

A Brief Digression on the Syntax and Practice of Hopefulness: Alexander Pope Before turning to ethnographic sources from Africa, it is worth stepping back further on this question of the temporal pace of recurrence and the

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orienting vista of hope by focusing briefly on the complexity of the phrase in my title, the vernacular English concept that comes closest to expressing resilience, namely “hope springs eternal,” which is a phrase from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, published in 1734. Pope’s own configuration alludes to hope as, indeed, belonging in “eternity.” But it is not thinkable by  humans in those terms; indeed people should not “presume” an understanding of God; “the proper study of Mankind is Man.” Hence hope endures as a kind of daily promise that there is, indeed, an eternity, and it lies more in the recurrence by which it “springs” (with the verb in the present continuous tense) than in any confident comprehension of an ultimate horizon. This was not a utopian or revolutionary hope for the distant future, then, but neither was its mundaneness similar, in his mind, to the Indians’ perception of a hopeful eternity approximating closely an already-known, mundane, and attainable comfort. The temporal combinations of “now” and “then” can be varied, as Pope himself intimates. Miyazaki’s most recent work, Arbitraging Japan, also suggests that “the contrast Tanaka [one of the traders Miyazaki studied] drew between refi nement and improvisation, as modalities of trading, was a contrast between temporal orientations” (2013: 85). Here is Pope’s own language, where hope seems to be released by these “springing” moments, in an “uneasy” philosophical and experiential place, where man turns with deliberation to study himself rather than the horizon of God and eternity. After this passage, I move to the ethnography about what I suggest may be wellsprings of hope and resilience in West Africa, and how they might arise recurrently in transactional life. Hope humbly, then. . . . What future bliss, He gives not thee to know, But gives that hope to be thy blessing now. Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest: The soul, uneasy and confined from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come. Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind; . . . He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire;

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But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company. (1734)

Spaces and Creativity in West African Scholarship Over the years, there has been a series of scholarly interventions on West African sciences of life that sees certain gaps and spaces, and recurrent techniques for their recognition and inhabitation, as somehow at the heart of things. We circle around them: the homing instinct for loopholes in the law; the capacity to proliferate names of things rather than assimilate novelties to old categories; tropic numbers that do not necessarily reduce to an absolute objective scale, and therefore make every numbering event into a performance; in brief, a definite and pervasive play in the parameters of life and thought, and an acuity for creating and moving into escape hatches. Andrew Apter (1992) and J. Lorand Matory (1994) both argue, on empirical grounds, that Yoruba religious thinking places absence rather than presence at the core. Matory argues from the study of possession: “The ritual juxtaposition of the head with vessels full of the god’s divine emblems demonstrates, for public view, [that] . . . heads are containers that potentially host a variety of beings” (1994: 135). The person is a container for active principles to inhabit; powerful secret discourses emanate from a space, not (or not only) from a structure or a foundation in a body of established knowledge. Apter argues that the “deeper” one goes into “deep Yoruba,” the closer one comes to an inchoate potential rather than an identifiable core element or proposition. The practice that most mundanely fi lls these spaces is divination. Not everyone undergoes possession, but in very many West African contexts every person’s life should be submitted to divination on a regular basis. Divination is centrally important in West African indigenous religious philosophy. In the Yoruba case it is based on a professionalized corpus of knowledge and practice (Abimbola 1994). And yet the operation of each event is unique to time, place, person, and issue, as is symbolized in the iconography of the divining tray on which is carved, to face the diviner, the face of Esu: trickster god and messenger to the pantheon. The concepts of order, confusion, restitution, and agency are quite different from the Abrahamic religions whose rituals inform Van Gennep’s seminal work on the structuring power of rites of passage and liminality relative to communities.1 Much of

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divinatory ritual relates to personal pathways of life, which in Yoruba cosmology are governed by Ori, the god of the head, the instantiation of one’s prebirth choice for an orientation or destiny. In my recent comparative exploration of the notion of “confusion” (Guyer 2005), the varied sources on Yoruba thought and practice suggested that Esu was among the most widely recognized of gods (Peel 2000: 108), the guardian of crossroads and thresholds and the god of confusion. Esu was an ever-present source of “indeterminacy and the inexplicable” (Hallen 2000: 73). And yet one source went deeper, to argue that “Esu seems to provoke trouble deliberately and to take delight in disorder, but he only brings things to a crisis that can be resolved by means of sacrifice. Without Esu the cosmos would be a battlefield of blind aggression” (Witte 1984: 14). So divination was exercised in those many recurrent moments when the inevitable indeterminacy of the world and of the human life path demanded expert diagnosis for par ticular instances and their remedies. Restitution of a generalized order was not possible: just time-place-person specific intervention. As a shortcut to what ought to be a much longer analysis of the escape of these modes of praxis from the categories of structural analytics, let me just quote an interchange between a missionary and a babalawo (literally, “ father of secrets”) in 1852 about Ifa, the deity of divination, from John Peel’s (2000) historical work on Yoruba conversion to Christian ity. The interchange is followed by Peel’s commentary: Missionary: Ifa cannot speak. Babalawo: How do you understand from your book what God says? Missionary: Why, the words are plain before us. Babalawo: We are likewise acquainted with [Ifa] that we know immediately what he means by consulting him. Missionary: But your Ifa is always changing. If he says a thing just now and you were to consult him upon the same thing a few minutes after that he will say quite another thing altogether. But our book never changes. Open the same place a hundred times and you will find the same thing. This shows that God and his works are true and Ifa and his words false. But I am inclined to believe the words are your own and not Ifa’s. Babalawo: Well, Ifa gives a distinct prophecy every time he is consulted. (225)

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“Where the indigenous wisdom of Ifa was secret, pragmatically oriented, flexible, specific in its application, and linked to status, the Word of God as presented by the missionaries was open, ethically oriented, fi xed, universal in application, and in principle independent of status” (ibid.). This incommensurability of a philosophy that foregrounds sameness and difference and a philosophy that foregrounds uniqueness is precisely the analytical challenge with respect to the economy. The very same Yoruba argument—that each event is both unique and referential or recursive— could be made about quantification in monetary transactions and the division of labor. In a noncapitalist commercial economy, labor can be considered in all its local as well as generalizable characteristics: as comprising time, skill, and personal predilections as well as the classic criteria of category or type, class membership, and productivity or income level by which industrial labor is formally measured. Kinds of work are both different (by occupation, tool, commodity) and also very similar in that the concepts of selfhood and social orga nization for different occupations are straightforward transpositions of each other. Over time, the “occupational repertoire seems to change range and composition” without changing much in organizational form or philosophical basis. It is a society and economy in which change is constant and “a parsimonious economy of terms and organizational rubrics [enables] profusion and invention” (Guyer 1997: 223, 224). It is from this space of potentiality, several works infer, that the dynamic we call “resilience” emanates. There are always spaces, and people are tropic toward them. They combine the novel vision involved in moving into a space with the replicative imagination of knowing how to do so without, at the same time, prejudging any specific outcome. This kind of process is recognized as fundamental even to the social dynamics of the peopling of Africa itself. Igor Kopytoff ’s (1987) now-classic depiction of Africa as a frontier continent rests on a perception of this kind. According to him, small societies did not evolve into more complex ones by internal invention. Social forms shifted from center to frontier by replication in new spaces: “What we see are building blocks of different sizes, and chips off the blocks, and the moving kaleidoscope of their grouping and regrouping. This process has been steady and constant and consequently its products—small polities and societies— ubiquitous” (78). I could see much of my own thinking about social organization as working toward a somewhat different version of this same perception. Kopytoff

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tended to see the reproduction of social forms as conservative: the frontier was an “institutional vacuum” (25) into which moved “pre-existing models of the social order and its cultural reproduction” (33). At the time when I reviewed this book, I was enthusiastic but also diffident about the idea of replicating models, with its implication of conservatism. It took a while to see why. The discipline’s concepts of models were quite deficient, and their structuralist foundations tended to get in the way of the deeper historical and philosophical imagination that the ethnography provoked. Careful historical ethnography, such as the work of Georges Dupré (1982) and Marie-Claude Dupré (1995) in the Congo, was discerning cycles in sociality and in ecology and charismatic moments of change that stretched the meaning of replication, without necessarily resulting in abandonment of the whole idea of a “tradition” as Jan Vansina (1990) had developed it. I tried developing a concept of another social form in Equatorial Africa, under the title “Traditions of Invention” (Guyer 1996). If social orders were made up of skilled adepts in different domains of life—blacksmiths, hunters, dancers, spiritual virtuosos, wood carvers, and so on—rather than incumbents of the social roles of kinship and chieftaincy, then the whole import of rites of passage, liminality, and anticipation would be different and more open. Composition into ephemeral but powerful social movements (cults, war parties, communities of “big men”), I argued, was a social process parallel to and different from demographic accumulation through kinship and clientage. The “creative space” still opened up, but in a different place: displaced from a geopolitical collective frontier to the personal-intellectual one as individuals oriented themselves toward their own frontiers of knowledge in a process I referred to as “self-realization.” “Resilience” springs eternal, then, not because people aim for restitution or social reproduction, as a structuralist position would imply, but because spaces themselves are a primary and eternal component of both ontology and context. The realization of human potential involves moving into them.2 The above, however, is a gestalt, not a theory. And it fl irts rather dangerously with cultural essentialism. Perception of patterns is a crucial stage in thinking, but as a general theory, the idea that space is at least as compelling a presence as constraint needs developing. How is this kind of creative power to be understood in a more close-grained fashion? Can we identify the push of intention, the pull of the future, or are those altogether wrong terms? Should we turn to Deleuze (Difference and Repetition; 1994) or to various different versions of performance theory (Turner 1987; Fabian 1983) or to Yoruba phi losopher Akiwowo (1986)? It must be obvious by now how help-

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ful a new analytic of hope would be in returning to the ethnography and trying again to think about the implications of divinatory cultures, with their own poetics and practice with respect to the temporal sequences of words, concepts, and their expressive phraseology that connect emergent moments with the sequences of action and effectivity in the world.

Moving into the Spaces Several scholars of western Nigeria have moved partway in this direction, so let me give three sketches of ethnographic treatments of cognate dynamics, to which “hope” might apply as an analytic for the tropic spaces. My own argument (Guyer 1997) about social and economic life in western Nigeria was that products and occupations follow a “niche” logic within regional and intercontinental markets. The establishment of anything new is highly competitive. A new product, a new skill, a new artisanal phase of production first of all has to be successfully named to differentiate it conceptually from the existing repertoire. There are hundreds and hundreds of named occupations: tractor tire repairer (different from car tire repairer), fan repairer, panel beater (automobile body repairer), different kinds of house painters, battery recharger, genres of musical performers and different kinds of drummers, and so on. The horizon is an endless vista. Any word can be prefixed by oni-, ala-, or ele-, conveying “ownership of,” “identity with,” or, perhaps best, “animator of.” A new Christianity was aladura (owners of prayer); laborers for the melon-seed (egusi) harvest are elegusi; the chairperson of a meeting is alaga (literally, “owner of the chair”). Once named, there is an entire configuration of forms of sociality that can be tailored to the operation of that niche: occupational association membership (meetings, dues, regulatory frameworks, offices), terms of training in apprenticeship and employment, price mediation, forms of competition and collaboration, market promotion, and relations with linked occupations in the commercial chain. The position of an occupational niche is always fragile: small shifts can take away the clientele, cut off supplies, reduce the price of the product, foster a competing product or skill, expand or contract the need for workers. And yet new ones will struggle into existence: different grades of tractor driver or operator, different kinds of harvest laborer by crop, new kinds of moneylender. Or particular occupations move into new geographical areas. In January 2005 I was in the countryside in western Nigeria for the fi rst time in two years to witness the

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stunning presence of a highly organized charcoal business where it had hardly existed before: large storage yards beside the road, transport vehicles, teams of workers, techniques for approaching landowners, a regional organization, and so on (Brieger and Salami 2004). More specifically for our point here, people see the possibility of moving from one occupational niche to another with an alacrity that was not conceivable in the guild/apprenticeship model of medieval and early modern Europe. A successful musician talks about his work in niche terms, and then suggests that perhaps he is going to give it up and go into construction instead (Waterman 1990: 156). A successful yam seller turns entirely to trade in beer (Trager 1985). Similar, I would suggest, is the lability and optionality in the transactional dynamics I identify in Marginal Gains (Guyer 2004). Techniques of counting evade the absolutism of modern reductive numbers. Each transaction is both uniquely tailored to context and also a replication. Helen Verran (2001) has gone deeper than myself into this domain. She has used Yoruba numbering to define the formal qualities of emergent worlds. Number in Yoruba language and practice can link unity to plurality as either one/many or as part/whole. Actual calculative acts in the here and now can evoke one or the other (or a history of both). Indeed, the things counted can also, like the numbering conventions, be thought of in either the one/many or the part/ whole modes, giving rise then to an endless regression into particularity rather than generality. The history and potential of both things and numbers are kept in play. Hence the contingency of the moment, as a punctuation point where “objects/subjects [are narrated] as outcomes of past collective goings-on and recognize their participation in remaking par ticu lar times and places as (re)generating worlds” (Verran 2001: 94). Verran makes a strong point that what emerges is not “novelty” in any absolute sense, because resolutions are only possible through “a set of routine and repetitious practices” that reinstates at each point the deictic quality of the repertoire of concepts for materials and for numbers. But the result is not sameness and the process is therefore not predictable. Here again, the ethnography and logical analysis are telling us that replication is the means through which newness is created. Routine should not be understood as a repetition of outcome but as a reprise of method. It is an unending reapplication of past realizations to present potentials for theoretically limitless permutation and combination. Verran’s work thus gives us the evidence and the logic, but it does not look fully and systematically at the performance. All resolution in such a system of numbering practice must be arrived at performatively, that is, in spe-

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cific contexts, rather than in the abstract or objective mode. After Turner’s seminal work on liminality, we know that the “space between” can be shorter or longer, instantaneous or internally richly phased. Indeed, Miyazaki (2004) includes examples of shorter-term gift transactions alongside the long, drawn-out historical process of resolution of claims to land. Short “spaces,” in contained social contexts, can also be part of a series, like beads on a necklace, or more like rehearsals or incitations for cumulative momentum across a longer and more socially inclusive temporal “space.” Karin Barber places a very similar cultural process within a performative theoretical context. In The Generation of Plays, she sees every step as improvisational, from the creation of a theatrical company, through the choice of a theme and the development of character to each and every unique performance before a singular audience at a particular time. Writing of the Yoruba popular theater of the years between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, she concludes, Potential is what is as yet undecided . . . the actors and audiences of the popu lar theater understand the whole of experience as imbued with potentiality: every thing is continually emergent, continually requiring to be worked out afresh. . . . The concepts of experience, example and potential work together to suggest how people continually generate their moral environment. They give a handle on characteristic features of performance and moral discourse in West African popular culture: prime among which are the tendency to multiplication and proliferation; the analogical mode; and the method of composition by assemblage. (Barber 2000: 431) The theater troupe itself was formed like a group of artisans, working their market niche. And their plays exemplified the themes of competing; assembling supporters, clients, and colleagues; shifting modes; and discovering each character’s path forward. “People do not regard themselves as being actuated by rules and norms: destiny itself is emergent, only disclosing itself as a result of the individual’s self-motivated original activity, his ese (feet) purposefully taking him along the path where his ori (chosen ‘head’ or destiny) is headed.” There is a moral here: “Do not write people off: no one knows what someone may become tomorrow” (ibid., 430). The empirical domains addressed by these works are so different, and the detail so assiduously assembled, that we might at least entertain the idea that

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in seeing their conceptual convergence we are being directly instructed by the practices of everyday life and common views of the openness of the future rather than imposing our own theoretical grid. Scholars in regional fields do, however, read one another’s work to find analytical inspiration, so of course the consonance among the accounts is not entirely independent. Does such “pattern recognition” risk essentialism, flattening out the historical and imaginative dynamics of the pattern’s production and migration across domains? It would, if we simply assimilated this propensity to some kind of ethnic particularity, without historical and theoretical framing. Each of us has done this in different ways: Verran through links to a theory of logic; Barber through theories of language; myself through macrohistorical contextualization. But coming back to the microanalytical challenge, I think Barber has taken us all a step further in her use of the concept of “example.” One can profit over and over again, in hope of reapplicability to one’s own work, from the three pages she devotes to this concept (2000: 427–30). Let me quote one passage: Through their particularity, examples enable you to seize upon a phenomenon as if intuitively. . . . “Give me an example” I say as I struggle to comprehend your point. You give me an example but I still don’t understand, so you give me another example. The second example will be different from the first, and it is in the difference—a fresh angle, a new start—that illumination resides. . . . The general cannot be conceptualized or stated except through example: and its dimensions are never fully known, only partially indicated by a multiplication of illustrations. You work back and forth from examples to what is exemplified, never arriving at a final stable “model” but rather refreshing your conceptualization of what is being exemplified by every additional example. (Ibid., 428; original emphasis) There is an implicit theory of knowledge here—of the world’s knowability, the pathways to knowledge, the form it takes, and the human capacity to grasp and apply it—as well as a social theory of communication. There is selectivity and option at every stage, as people’s lives intersect tangentially. There is a certain parallelism here between Yoruba philosophy and current approaches to ethnographic work of the kind Miyazaki also aspires to: selective deference to (salvation of) the past; the denial of closure or finality; the forward momentum; and even the seemingly boundless optimism about

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potential that would return us to the hackneyed concept of “resilience.” The idea of hope is one “next step” beyond Turner (1987), who also, nevertheless, called for such a parallel. “The Anthropology of Performance” and “Performing Ethnography” are chapter titles in his posthumously published book The Anthropology of Per formance. The reasons given for holding such parallels between the people’s endeavors and our own firmly in mind, no matter what tensions are generated, have included a political-moral commitment to co-evalness (Fabian 1983). But I find the classic intellectual reasons at least as compelling. It allows one to ask whether the conceptual specificity of each casts light on the other. The theory of hope, as a descendant of a particular intellectual genealogy, is more or less explicitly grounded in a messianic temporal matrix that differs from the secular determinisms of modernist theory that inform both popular culture and modernist social science in Western social contexts. Hyam Maccoby writes, in his Philosophy of the Talmud, “Certain features of biblical and rabbinic morality could be characterized as ‘messianic-anticipatory.’ They form a way of living appropriate to a messianic era regarded as far ahead. . . . It is possible and mandatory for an anticipatory community to embark on this way of life now, so that mankind can send an expedition into the future” (2002: 75). Miyazaki (2004: 20–23) draws explicitly on the messianic intimations in the works of both Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin. All the descendent religions of the Abrahamic legacy proclaim, “We ever hope in Thee,” and practice a prospective openness that may have a sense of personal and collective telos that is quite different from Yoruba philosophical orientations. Yoruba exemplary performances may embody another cosmological configuration altogether.3 So the key thing that holding the tension in mind can achieve is a much greater attention to the “timescape” itself (rather than the structuring question and resolution), and to the replication of those features from one instance to another. This question opens up ethnographic work to a whole domain of scholarship that needs combing, and that I do not know well enough yet to apply. For example, there are all the varied works on repetition that derive from Benjamin’s (1969) seminal paper “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the philosophy of repetition in the work of Deleuze (1993), and so on. One should revisit the form and substance of Max Weber’s ([1905] 1930) argument in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and particularly the concept of discipline as repetition or recapitulation. In searching for imagery and inspiration, I have also thought

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of the artistic concept of “negative space”: of the absences without which the phenomenal world that we experience directly would have no power or meaning. How long can a suspension be maintained before it loses aesthetic and spiritual tension? How frequent and of what sort are replications (singular? sequential? nested?)? Are there “owners/animators of space” (in the Yoruba sense), experts who tutor the senses and the intellect of others as they navigate the free fall into an anticipatory mode? Finally there are questions about affect (holding in abeyance for the moment any ultimate grounding of all temporal affect in messianism). Can the very replication itself, and the frequency of an opportunity to consult and redress, be seen as the implicit evidence for a “hopeful” affect, a “prospective momentum” (Miyazaki 2004: 135)? Where else might one recognize the quality of momentum? Posing a contrast can help. T. S. Eliot had a grimmer view of action: that the indeterminate space within the “hollow men” is invaded by doubt and fear, what he calls “the shadow”: Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow (1964: 80)4 But in that case, perhaps replication becomes increasingly impossible to bear and therefore attenuates altogether, leaving “hope” as an inference drawn entirely from the very fact of persistence. In pondering the conundrum of how to think through these questions ethnographically, I had the mundane thought that no progress could be made on any of the deeper questions unless we paid much closer attention to the intertemporal process of exemplary action itself. “Resilience” of “hope” can only be a dispensation in the present when the present instance is a recognizable point in an open series, over time.

Example and Replication, Across Time Barber’s exploration of examples in her conclusion is thought out through theories of understanding. Her own cases, however, are initially described in existential terms as part of instigations to action, as inspirations to “Work,

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Destiny, and Self-Making” (title of chapter 11). The members of the audiences for the plays “pick a lesson . . . [and they] actively sought to extract these examples in order to profit from them” (2000: 427). How this works in life cannot be explored from her own vantage point of the stage and the play. One would have to inhabit the audiences’ ongoing allusions to and applications of the lessons chosen. So what would be a plausible ethnographic corpus on such a process, that is, on the recurrent spaces into which such lessons are inserted? I think there are two, which could be cross-checked with each other. The most obvious, because the most intellectually amenable or accessible, is the recurrent ritual moment. Prayer and divination are symbolically marked as repetitive actions, usually on a set calendar, created expressly to open up a channel for metaphysical communication. One would need to understand the open-endedness in such series, as their implications become compounded over time. So far (as I know), the processual approach to divination has been applied within individual séances (Zeitlyn 2001). Turner’s (1974) classic work on sequences of healing rituals with the same protagonist and Moore’s (1986) extension to sequences of law cases with the same parties do explore the cumulative power of serial replication to produce, in these cases, progressive exclusion.5 In general, however, the processes of living an ordinary life and making an ordinary living have not figured prominently in the study of intertemporal series of consultations. The sheer mundaneness of oracular consultation means that it hardly appears in personal or even community-level historical accounts. And yet Yoruba were said to consult Ifa every four days for guidance about the course of action to be taken, the nature of sacrifices to be made, and the direction of productive thought to be pursued. Four-day intervals are just one day shorter than the classic market week, so in principle consultations were made with an even tighter rhythm than that of commerce. One must assume that people did ask for mundane guidance that kept them oriented toward the fulfi llment of what was posited as their ori (head, personal chosen destiny), which included crucially their occupations in a commercial artisanal economy. I remember an elder telling me in 1968 that he had migrated to start a cocoa farm after consultation with the diviner, and that he had returned many years later when divination suggested a return home was the right course to take. In principle a series of successive mundane divinations refers back and forth, from one moment of hope, abeyance, intention, dedication (obedience?), and outcome to another. The form is repetitive but each instance is

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reflexive and recursive, creating the kind of stepwise narrative form so characteristic of some early Yoruba literature such as Tutuola’s ([1953] 1970) The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Ideally, one could trace out life careers by focusing on these punctuation points, when several possibilities were considered and chance burst forth, instead of the intervening phases of routine functioning in a single occupation. In brief, there is a divinatory or prayerful6 version one could tell of the signal moments in a personal work history that may be far more impor tant to the protagonist than the content of the work itself or the retrospective summary one might construct. With a method of hope, the tropic points of change would figure more prominently than the classifications of the time between the hope-inspiring performances. An expanded focus on explicitly metaphysical intervention during performance, however, raises a question and a potential distinction. In ritual practice in the European/Van Gennep tradition, the intervention in the moment of abeyance is presumed authoritative. Weber hardly explores the actual content of prayer and answer for the Calvinists, especially around the particu lar, situational business issues that were necessarily posed in the “spirit of capitalism.” He looks at what the ritual practices disciplined them to do in the world. I was struck by this: What did Calvinists pray for and anticipate during their regular sessions with God? For them, presumably there was the single authoritative Voice to which they tuned their perception. One wonders whether this receptivity to authoritative instruction should be differentiated from the kind of spaces and agencies indicated by Barber for the Yoruba, where multiple examples may flood the mind during moments of hopeful abeyance. The subtle arguments from example and allegorical texts invoked by the diviners on the basis of the Ifa corpus provide more room for an acknowledgment of human agency and perhaps thereby for a range of more secular extensions of the divinatory logic. The dynamic of multiple examples, tailored to the moment and the situation, can be illustrated from a small book by J. O. Aluko on the osomalo, early twentieth-century Yoruba traders on credit. It offers graphic instances of the specificity of each and every transaction in the osomalo’s portfolio. There were some rules of thumb for general social relations with clients but there was no single way to set up and enforce the credit commitment because there was no authoritative legal definition and sanction, and because no two cases were the same. The osomalo had to know how to extrapolate and invent from case to case, by example, as they turned their money rapidly

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from one transaction to another.7 Every thing was negotiable and therefore singularized. I link several key passages together: The typical items of trade hawked by the itinerant Osomalo traders included cloth, caps, arms and ammunition. The women sold items like cigarettes, kolanuts, headties and women’s clothes. Their money was invested in buying and storing local items that could be exported to other parts of the country. . . . The Osomalo sold cloth either in bundles or in single yards depending on the requirements of his client. The head of the compound or the community leader was usually asked to stand surety. . . . Sometimes a chalk mark on the wall at the back of the debtor’s house would indicate the terms of the agreement. . . . Prominent Osomalo traders used two methods to buy their goods. They either bought cash down, using their personal savings or loans from neighbours, or on credit. . . . The Osomalo’s method of debt recovery usually depended on the social position of the debtor. The Osomalo normally used the taboos of the debtor’s society in the handling of any uncooperative or habitual debtors. . . . [As a result,] the modern Sales Day Book and the Osomalo’s Sales Account differ completely. [The latter] might not contain dates of sales, the type of material sold, the measure of length, or the rate. Quite often the correct names of debtors were not recorded. . . . [They] could calculate how many market days at intervals of 5, 9 or 17 days, there were between January 1 of any given years and the 31st December of the same year. . . . Traders often depended on memory . . . [and] the ability to recognize people easily either by their facial marks, colour, appearance or family connections. (Aluko 1993: 27–42) After 1960, when the national law precluded certain modes of credit practice, the osomalo stopped serving everyone across the spectrum of society, and this heralded the moment when “the system had begun to decline” (ibid., 55). The whole practice depended on the ability of the trader to replicate the debt relationship but in a ramifying range of possible forms, in the hope and expectation of gain in each of them, albeit by different means. The osomalo lived in a context of proliferation, for which he or she was author, beneficiary, and observing participant. Every thing that happened was an example, not a model. Every situation called for new extrapolation, a

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“learning in the mean time” (Miyazaki 2004: 129). Every space at the center of a business deal held the specific outcome in abeyance for the right or acceptable configuration of terms to emerge. Parenthetically, Aluko also describes the same replicative associational dynamics for their occupation that I alluded to earlier: “An association of all Osomalo traders and their apprentices was usually set up in a par ticu lar area. . . . Such an association had the duty of protecting the interests of its members. Its officials settled disputes. . . . The traders cooperated . . . they assisted one another financially, physically and morally. . . . It was impossible for anybody to trade in any trading zone without joining the association” (1993: 30). Perhaps we see in divination and proliferation two microdynamics of replicative processes rather similar to the one addressed by Miyazaki, and called for by Bloch, that goes beyond the messianic temporal matrix. In the Yoruba case, spaces opened up all the time, in all kinds of surprising places. Anticipation and resolution were writ very small as well as very large. The eternal was made up of thousands of internested temporalities, each of which contained the prospective momentum of replication of event, example, and experience. Surely what we have called resilience owed something to these processes.

The “Eternal”: A Thousand Moments or an Endless Vista? Can we see the thousand-moments dynamics in our own context, or does messianic time “run interference” on it? What sort of a mix is there now, with Pentecostal Christianity and a changing Islam in Nigeria and many struggles here? When I submitted my title for this chapter, I thought the parallels and convergences across the popu lar economies of the “neoliberal” world would be different from what I now consider them to be. In fact, I thought this chapter would be a version of another paper that is more focused on the United States: “Between Rationality and Prophecy.” The “thousand moment” version of the future has occupied a very specific cultural and organizational space in Western Protestant culture, perhaps associated with entrepreneurialism; it has never been as pervasive as it was in Yoruba society and culture in the era before Pentecostalism. The frequent opening up of life to a consideration of multiple exemplary possibilities evokes a specific form of reasoning and affect, a kind of expectation that is precisely not a calculated

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probability from past experience. There is now, in mainstream Western public discourse, a different set of institutions and ideas from the divinatory mode for anticipating the near future, based on a theoretical orientation of probability that extrapolates from the past. Certain aspects of people’s economic lives are disciplined by instruments that are designed according to these calculated risk models and that exert powerful authority and penalty on the daily, weekly, annual, and life-cycle punctuation of time. Even now, I am not yet sure how to characterize what is happening, but I feel convinced that the more literal phenomenology that Miyazaki is advocating, especially of sequences over time, would help clarify the temporal relationship between the eternal and the near future, the vista one sees when one asks, “What comes next?” (Verdery 1996). All the African sources seem to imply that the unknown nature of the future is a wellspring of hope to many people in a whole variety of circumstances, in the positive substantive sense. Between the idea and the reality fall several possibilities; between the emotion and the response fall a quickening of the intellect, an anticipation of the heart, and an expectation of change, rather than the “shadow” of despair or the obligation to the next payment in the financial regimen. An analysis of divination, the application of examples (as distinct from imperatives) to one’s own life dilemmas, suggests a certain hopeful logic that is consonant with dynamics in the popular economy. But I finish with some caveats. My exploration is entirely preliminary, worked out from published sources. No one has ever done field research using the method of hope on the economic life of (for example) the wholesale electronics market in Lagos. And I am still uncertain that, having followed the method of hope in all its exemplary reorientation of framing and description, one would necessarily end up wanting to use “hope” in its substantive meaning to depict all anticipatory orientations. There is an extensive library on divination and prayer in archaic and modern informal economies that beckons, and an even more extensive reality of their mutual implications in the twenty-fi rst-century world.

Notes 1. Divination did exist in ancient Israel (Cryer 1994). Arguably the practices we group into “divination” form one of the most universal components of religious and secular culture (Vernant et al. 1974). It lies beyond my chapter to carry out the comparative

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review that an expanded effort on “hope” worldwide would certainly demand. I feel convinced that the temporalities and modalities of divination, prayer, and consultation are fundamental to the phenomena we are addressing here, not only in West Africa. 2. I hesitate to refer to this quality as entrepreneurship, in part because it does not differentiate one type of actor from another, and it is difficult to distinguish between “expansion within an existing practice” (adaptive response) and “do(ing) something else . . . that is outside the range of existing practice” (creative response) (Schumpeter [1947] 1991: 411). The theorization of noncapitalist markets seems to me very weak, in spite of historical, archeological, and anthropological studies. Th is vast era and geography of economic life was momentarily brought together by Karl Polanyi and collaborators in Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson 1957). Many of its terms were immediately critiqued (formal and substantive economy, administered trade, idealism in the presentation of the caste system, and so on). But the theoretical gap remains. The concept of “the market” tacitly refers to capitalism in most writing about the neoliberal world economy. 3. Barber does make the point several times over that these plays are historically specific to the postconversion era. About half of the Yoruba population is Christian and half Muslim. The degree to which, and the ways in which, religious thinking about The Example (capitalized) gives new vibrancy to what is clearly a much older set of ideas is a question that I think could profitably be folded into the questions asked about the temporal features of exemplary reference in the current lived life, as distinct from the play, the book or the theory. 4. And continuing, as a repetition-with-difference, Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow. . . . Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow (Eliot 1964: 79–80) 5. Perhaps this was hopeful for some and not others. One has to entertain the possibility that one person’s hope entails another’s despair. 6. I imagine that prayer is conceptualized in a similar way, but have no idea whether there are systematic studies of the recurrent guidance given to careers and professional

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behav ior in the recurrent practice of prayer, even in the famous prosperity churches. It could be very impor tant to do such work. 7. “The Osomalo traders did not tie down their capital for long, therefore, in whatever form they saved their money. They preferred to buy and sell goods as many times as possible in a given year, since they were interested in quick returns on their capital” (Aluko 1993: 48).

References Abimbola, Wande. 1994. “Ifa: A West African Cosmological System.” In Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression, ed. T. Blakely, W. van Beek, and D. Thomson, 100–116. London: James Currey. Akiwowo, Akinsola. 1986. “Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry.” International Sociology 1(4): 343–58. Aluko, J. O. 1993. Oṣomalo: The Early Exploits of the Ijesa Entrepreneur. Ibadan: African Book Builders. Apter, Andrew. 1992. Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barber, Karin. 2000. The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in the Theater. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–51. New York: Schocken Books. Brieger, William, and Kabiru Salami. 2004. “Charcoal Production in Ibarapa.” Unpublished manuscript. Chayanov, A. V. 1966. The Theory of Peasant Economy. Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin. Cryer, Frederick H. 1994. Divination in Ancient Israel and Its Near Eastern Environment: A Socio-Historical Investigation. Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Dupré, Georges. 1982. Un ordre et sa destruction. Paris: ORSTOM. Dupré, Marie-Claude. 1995. “Raphia Monies Among the Teke.” In Money Matters, Instability, Values and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities, ed. Jane Guyer, 39–52. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Eliot, T. S. 1964. “The Hollow Men.” In T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems. San Diego: Harcourt Inc. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1963. Agricultural Involution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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Guyer, Jane  I. 1996. “Traditions of Invention in Equatorial Africa.” African Studies Review 39(3): 1–28. ———. 1997. An African Niche Economy: Farming to Feed Ibadan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2004. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. “Confusion and Empiricism: Several Connected Thoughts.” In Christianity in Africa: Essays in Honor of J. D. Y. Peel, ed. Toyin Falola, 83–97. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Guyer, Jane I., LaRay Denzer, and Adigun Agbaje, eds. 2002. Money Strug gles and City Life: Devaluation in Ibadan and Other Urban Centers in Southern Nigeria, 1986– 1996. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Hallen, Barry. 2000. The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful: Discourse About Values in Yoruba Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hart, Keith. 1973. “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana.” Journal of Modern African Studies 11(3): 61–89. Hopkins,  A.  G. 1973. An Economic History of West Africa. New York: Columbia University Press. Koolhaas, Rem. 2000. Mutations. Barcelona: ACTAR. Kopytoff, Igor. 1987. “The Internal African Frontier: The Making of African Political Culture.” In The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies, ed. Igor Kopytoff, 3–84. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Maccoby, Hyam. 2002. The Philosophy of the Talmud. New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Matory, J. Lorand. 1994. Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and Politics of the Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2013. Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moore, Sally F. 1986. Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peel, John D. Y. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Polanyi, Karl,  C. Arensberg, and  H. Pearson. 1957. Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Polgreen, Lydia. 2006. “Misery Loves Optimism in Africa.” New York Times, Week in Review Section, March 5: 1, 4. Pope, Alexander. 1734. Essay on Man. London: Printed for J. Wilford. Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1947) 1991. “The Study of Entrepreneurship.” In The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg, 406–28. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Trager, Lillian. 1985. “From Yams to Beer in a Nigerian City: Expansion and Change in Informal Sector Trade Activity.” In Markets and Marketing, ed.  S. Plattner, 259–86. Monographs in Economic Anthropology 4. Lanham: University Press of America. Turner, Victor. 1974. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine. ———. 1987. The Anthropology of Per formance. New York: PAJ. Tutuola, Amos. (1953) 1970. The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Van Gennep, Arnold. (1913) 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vansina, Jan. 1990. Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vernant,  J.  P.,  L. Vandermeersch,  J. Gernet,  J. Bottero,  R. Crahay,  L. Brisson,  J. Carlier, D. Grodzynski, and A. Retel Laurentin. 1974. Divination et rationalité. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Verran, Helen. 2001. Science and an African Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Waterman, Christopher. 1990. Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. (1905) 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen and Unwin. Witte, Hans. 1984. Ifa and Esu: Iconography of Order and Disorder. Soest-Holand: Kunsthandel Luttik. Zeitlyn, David. 2001. “Finding Meaning in the Text: The Process of Interpretation in Text-Based Divination.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 7(2): 225–40.

CHAPTER 7

Obama’s Hope: An Economy of Belief and Substance Hirokazu Miyazaki

“Hold fi rmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess” (New York Times 2008a). On August 28, 2008, at the Democratic National Convention held in Denver, Colorado, Senator Barack Obama concluded his acceptance speech, “The American Promise,” with this passage from the Letter to the Hebrews (10:23). The passage (“Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful,” in the New Revised Standard Version) in part concerns the nature of Christian faith.1 The second part of the verse, “for he who has promised is faithful,” refers to the “sure and unchangeable character of God’s promises” (Long 1997: 78). In other words, the passage Obama quoted in his speech preaches the interdependence of faith and hope. Faith is the basis of hope, that is, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).2 Like the author of Hebrews, Obama also tarries with “things not seen.” In his acceptance speech, he earlier remarked, “It is that American spirit, that American promise, that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fi x our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend” (New York Times 2008a). The phrase “what is unseen” evokes Saint Paul’s well-known words: “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24–25).

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As Obama repeatedly emphasized in his 2008 campaign speeches, what he means by hope is not the same as “blind optimism” but rather is something that demands patience just like the Christian hope that Saint Paul defined in the passage above (see also Badiou 2003: 93–97; cf. Berlant 2011). For example, following his victory in the Iowa Caucus on January 3, 2008, he said, “Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it” (New York Times 2008b). All in all, Hebrews 10:23 captures the spirit of Obama’s campaign when it had urged the American people to “believe” and “hope.” In his numerous campaign speeches, Obama deployed belief, hope, promise, and other notions loosely drawn from his Christian faith. It is easy to see in his deployment of these Christian concepts yet another manifestation of the familiar Christian concept of the Christian foundation of America as a promised land. Yet, what was the significance of Obama’s effort to reclaim these Christian ideas at that moment in history by replicating them from the terrain of the sacred onto the terrain of the secular?3 In this chapter, I compare several specific situations in which the secular and the sacred meet through the idea of hope. First, I turn to Pope Benedict XVI’s second encyclical, “Spe Salvi,” released in November 2007. The title of the encyclical points to Saint Paul’s words quoted above, “For in hope we were saved” (Spe salvi facti sumus) (Romans 8:24), and the encyclical also draws on the idea of hope discussed in the Letter to the Hebrews. The juxtaposition of Obama’s hope and the pope’s hope may seem odd. The Christian tradition that is important in Obama’s personal history is that of Protestant African American churches, not the tradition of Roman Catholicism. This is selfevident perhaps from the fact that the phrase “the audacity of hope,” the title of Obama’s celebrated keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention of 2004 and of his book outlining his political philosophy, came from a sermon delivered by Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama 2006). Yet, the juxtaposition is perhaps justified by the very fact that these two spiritual and political world leaders spoke of hope at around the same political moment. In other words, this chapter responds to the simple question, What was the particular significance of Obama’s campaign of hope?, from the viewpoint of the relationship between the secular and the sacred, and in particular in relation to its theoretical corollary, the tension between belief and substance. What emerges from the juxtaposition of Obama’s hope and Pope Benedict’s hope is the deep connection between the temporality of Christian hope

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and what the philosopher of hope Ernst Bloch termed the temporality of “not yet” (Bloch 1986). According to Bloch, the temporality of “not yet” results from the dialectical relationship between “what has already come” (or its extension, the temporality of “no longer”) and “what has not yet come” (see also Miyazaki 2004). What is significant in Bloch’s conception is the way the category of “not yet” entails within itself an aspect of “no longer,” and vice versa. Hope in this sense is simultaneously both known and unknown and is informed simulta neously by both the past and the future. In my own terms, it is this persistent “reorientation” from “no longer” to “not yet” that defines hope’s temporal movement (Miyazaki 2004, 2006; see also the Introduction to this volume). In the latter half of the chapter, drawing on my past two ethnographic research projects, I juxtapose two radically different forms of intersection between the secular and the sacred, namely, indigenous Fijian gift giving and Japanese financial trading practices, in order to examine the reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet” embedded in these two contrasting forms of exchange. In the conclusion, I return to Obama’s hope and reflect on the significance of the election of Obama in the midst of the historic 2008 global financial crisis. In this respect, also, Obama’s hope is yet another manifestation of the tension between belief and substance.

Faith as Substance “Faith is hope,” Pope Benedict proclaims in his second encyclical, “Spe Salvi,” on the nature of Christian hope (2007). In this encyclical, Pope Benedict examines the interdependence between belief and hope that underlies the concept of hope in the Letter to the Hebrews. In particular, the encyclical draws attention to the long-standing theological debate about the meaning of the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews quoted above. In the King James Version, it reads, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (my emphasis). According to Pope Benedict, the focus of this debate is the original Greek term “hypostasis,” which is translated as “substance” in the King James Version, following the Latin translation of the line, “substantia” (Benedict XVI 2007, paragraph 7).4 Faith is the substance of hope.5 Pope Benedict presents three different approaches to faith as substance. In Thomas Aquinas’s conception of faith as “a habitus, that is, a stable dispo-

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sition of the spirit, through which . . . reason is led to consent to what it does not see,” Pope Benedict points out that “through faith in a tentative way . . . there are already present in us the things that are hoped for.” In contrast, in his German translation of the same passage, Martin Luther, who was doubtful of the idea of faith as substance, puts it as follows: “Standing firm in what one hopes, being convinced of what one does not see.” In Pope Benedict’s view, Luther’s translation introduces a “subjective” notion to faith through the idea of “conviction” that is lacking in the original Greek word, elenchos, used in the second half of the passage. According to Pope Benedict, elenchos is better understood in terms of a more “objective” notion of “proof.” Finally, in Pope Benedict’s own view, “faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: It gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a ‘proof ’ of the things that are still unseen.” Here the pope resorts to a distinctive temporal maneuver: “Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet.’ The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future” (Benedict XVI 2007: paragraph 7). Pope Benedict extends his discussion of the “substance of things hoped for” to the Greek term hyparchonta, that is, property, as contrasted with the “better things” in Heaven, that is, the hypostasis of faith: “For you had compassion for those who were in prison, and you cheerfully accepted the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting” (Hebrews 10:34). For Christians, in Pope Benedict’s view, faith as “substance” replaces earthly possessions as the foundation of their lives: “Hyparchonta refers to property, to what in earthly life constitutes the means of support, indeed the basis, the ‘substance’ for life, what we depend upon” (Benedict XVI 2007: paragraph 8). This means that Christians live their hopeful lives with patience and perseverance but with certainty: “[Faith] is the expectation of things to come from the perspective of a present that is already given. It is a looking-forward in Christ’s presence” (ibid., paragraph 10). In other words, the substance of Christian hope resides in an act of waiting for the future that has already arrived, the future that “is no longer simply a ‘not yet’ ” (paragraph 7). Christian hope gives rise to the problem of “substance,” and the substance entailed in that hope is different from secular substance, such as property, and is

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redefined as faith itself: “Faith gives life a new basis, a new foundation on which we can stand, one which relativizes the habitual foundation, the reliability of material income” (paragraph 8). The redefi nition of substance enables the reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet.” This is a most interesting formulation of the temporality of hope. But it relies on a rigid dichotomy of material and spiritual substance. The dichotomy generates further dichotomies, “religious faith” versus “scientific rationality” (and Marxism by extension) and “the church” versus “individualism,” and culminates in a conservative argument for the primacy of the church. In proposing this formulation of the temporality of hope, however, Pope Benedict most likely has in mind Bloch’s preoccupation with the “not yet” consciousness in his philosophy of hope. The Marxist Bloch proposes to replace God with the principle of “not yet,” arguing that in religions the principle of “not yet” has been “hypostatized as God” (1986: 1199). In other words, in his view, as I have suggested elsewhere, “it is not God that is the source of hope but hope that is the source of God” (Miyazaki 2004: 18), and from this point of view, whether hope implies humility before God or the limitless potential of human agency becomes irrelevant because “for Bloch, the source of hope is neither faith in God nor faith in humans. Hope is the source of such faith” (ibid.). This ostensibly atheist formulation of hope reverses the relationship between belief and hope entailed in the theological preoccupation with hope’s substance. The part of the encyclical that discusses the conception of hope in the early church seems to be based on a paper on Franciscan poverty written by future pope Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ([1985] 2008). In that paper, Ratzinger attacks Marxism and especially Bloch’s Principle of Hope. In Ratzinger’s view, the atheist Bloch could only approach hope as a “product of human activity” (Ratzinger [1985] 2008: 305). Ratzinger draws attention to the fact that hope is something one can comprehend when one is aware of one’s own limits as a human. However, as I have noted elsewhere (Miyazaki 2004), in Bloch’s philosophy of hope, the problem of the agency of humans and god(s) is replaced with the problem of temporality. For Bloch, hope is the source of human life and even of God (human creations of God). In this scheme, hope is substance. From this perspective, Bloch criticizes philosophy for being preoccupied with what is no longer and seeks to release philosophy in the realm of “not yet.” In other words, Bloch’s philosophy of hope is not an investigation into the nature of hope but an attempt to hope through reorientation

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from “no longer” to “not yet.” To the extent that Bloch’s philosophy of hope seeks to hope rather than contemplate the nature of hope, reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet” is at the heart of Bloch’s hope. Seen from this perspective, Bloch’s philosophy of hope and Pope Benedict’s critique of Bloch’s atheist Marxist formulation of hope share more than either would ever come to admit, that is, an operation of reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet.” In Pope Benedict’s formulation, the “not yet” itself is “no longer.” The idea of the material as a source of substance is replaced with the idea of the spiritual as a source of substance. The substance of faith is in the future that has been rendered “no longer ‘not yet.’ ” This is the future and “not yet” in what has already come, that is, Christ, “not yet” in “what has already come.” The substance of Christian hope resides in an act of waiting for the future that “has already come.” Moreover, both accomplish this reorientation through the redefinition of what counts as substance. The hope outlined by Pope Benedict in his encyclical is based on a move to claim faith as substance, which is a replication of substance on the secular terrain of property on the sacred terrain of faith. In Bloch’s philosophy, hope becomes substance of its own. I now turn to two different kinds of substance entailed in hope, that is, reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet,” in two very different kinds of economic exchange. The two kinds of economic action described below— indigenous Fijian gift exchange and Japanese derivatives trading—also exemplify the economy of “not yet” through the replication of substance across the divide between the secular and the sacred.

Gifts as Substance As generations of anthropologists have sought to explain, the indigenous Fijian term for land, vanua, simultaneously means “land” and “people.” As the owners of over 83 percent of the territory of the multiethnic state of Fiji, indigenous Fijians regard their land as both “property” (from which they earn rent) and the “truth” (dina). Here the earthly possession of land guarantees the enduring power of the “truth,” that is, the effectiveness (mana) of chiefs and people. In other words, vanua integrates the two kinds of substance mentioned in Pope Benedict’s 2007 encyclical. Land is simultaneously material and spiritual substance. In the indigenous Fijian view, vanua in

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turn is closely linked with the efficacy of lotu (Christian faith). The dynamic relationship between vanua and lotu guarantees the continual renewal of the indigenous Fijian faith in land as the substance of their Christian hope. As anthropologist of Fiji Naoki Kasuga has noted, the indigenous Fijian “persistent attachment to land” derives from the fact that for them it guarantees the “not yet.” Indigenous Fijians’ hope in development projects on their land has been repeatedly disappointed, and yet the disappointment of their hope in turn reminds them of the “not yet” status of reality. For indigenous Fijians, land serves as evidence of this ontological condition (Kasuga 1999: 386; my translation). This represents a significant departure from the biblical rendition of the relationship between the “law” and Christ, however, as expressed in the Letter to the Hebrews: “For the law has a shadow of the good things to come, and not the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered year by year, make perfect those who approach” (Hebrews 10:1). Here only Christ is capable of making Christians “perfect.” For indigenous Fijian Christians, in contrast, the ontological relationship between land and Christian faith is much more interdependent. This interdependent relationship between vanua and lotu manifests itself in the performative interplay of “no longer” and “not yet” embedded in indigenous Fijian ceremonial gift giving. As discussed in the Introduction, in every episode of indigenous Fijian gift giving, gift givers and gift receivers sit across from each other on layered mats spread over the floor or the ground. After describing the meaning of their gift s, the spokesperson for the gift givers poses and waits for a reaction from the gift receivers. This moment of “not yet” is followed by a ritual performance of acceptance and recognition by the spokesman for the gift receivers. After accepting the gifts, the spokesperson for the gift receivers usually goes on to say that the gifts are not necessary and then seeks to create another anticipatory moment of “not yet” by asking God to bless all present (see Miyazaki 2004: 7–8, 99–103). In The Method of Hope, I have treated this second moment of “not yet” as a replication of the first moment of “not yet” on a different terrain, that is, on the terrain of indigenous Fijian Christian faith. The reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet” entailed in the second moment of “not yet” is stretched over time, in that the moment of “not yet” does not result in an immediate sense of “already” or “no longer.” Ritual participants certainly do not expect God to respond right away. But the moment also contains an “echo” (Miyazaki 2004:

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8) of the fulfi llment of the first moment of “not yet,” which I suggest gives the second moment of “not yet” a compelling sense of anticipation. The structure of this anticipation resembles what Pope Benedict has alluded to as a kind of temporality that is “no longer simply a ‘not yet,’ ” except that indigenous Fijian Christians seem to achieve it through the replication of the hope entailed in gifts among humans in humankind’s exchange with God.

“As If ” Substance In her contribution to this volume, “Is the Law Hopeful?,” Annelise Riles examines the role of “as if ” concepts in law and the relationship between legal fictions and hope studies. A subjunctive mode can also be found in financial trading. Elsewhere, I examine the idea of arbitrage, and explain how the theory and practice of arbitrage are predicated on the oscillation between belief and doubt (Miyazaki 2007, 2013). Arbitrage, arguably the most important theoretical construct underlying modern financial economics and a frequently used trading strategy, contains an analogous reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet.” But the reorientation is achieved in a subjunctive (“as if ”) mode of engagement with both the theory and the practice of arbitrage. In arbitrage, traders seek monetary gains from differences in the prices of an asset (stock, commodity, etc.) in two different locations or differences in the prices of two functionally related assets (e.g., baskets of stocks and stock index futures) by buying low and selling high at the same time. In order to discover an arbitrage opportunity, however, arbitrageurs compute the theoretically correct prices of these assets backward from a hy pothetical condition in which the prices of the two assets in question converge and no arbitrage between them is conceivable. In other words, the practice of arbitrage is anchored in a fictional situation of no arbitrage. In theory, also, it is arbitrage that is supposed to make prices converge and bring about a condition of no arbitrage. The temporality of arbitrage is not unlike Pope Benedict’s paradoxical formulation of the temporality of Christian hope. Arbitrage is “no longer simply a ‘not yet’ ” to the extent that arbitrage exploits a moment of “not yet” made visible in relation to a fictional future moment of “no longer” in which arbitrage opportunities no longer exist due to arbitrageurs’ own action.

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In financial economics, as well as in financial markets, arbitrageurs are routinely distinguished from speculators. This common distinction focuses on their respective orientations toward risk. Speculators seek profits by aggressively taking risks on the basis of their prediction about future price movements. In contrast, arbitrageurs seek “riskless” profits. In theory, arbitrageurs simply find and take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. Their profits are not supposed to depend on the predictability of price movements. However, my ethnographic study of Japanese arbitrageurs shows that this distinction does not hold in practice. In practice, no arbitrage can be considered risk-free (see also Beunza and Stark 2004; MacKenzie 2006). Yet, the Japanese arbitrageurs I studied insisted on the importance of the distinction between arbitrageurs and speculators. In their view, however, the difference did not lie in their orientation toward risk. Rather, it resided in the character of their belief. From their point of view, speculation was dependent on a form of belief, that is, a faith in the efficacy of prediction. In contrast, arbitrageurs were supposed to refrain from entertaining such belief in themselves. They also had doubt about the idea of arbitrage itself and the theoretical assumptions behind it. In their view, arbitrage was simply an “as if ” construct. Arbitrage could only be seen to have substantive effects in the world if one decided to see it that way (see Miyazaki 2013: 122). Like the operation of arbitrage, arbitrageurs’ belief was circular. This belief was different from the kind of belief speculators were supposed to have. In my view, these arbitrageurs’ subjunctive faith in the efficacy of their own work was critical to the way they were able to continually engage in arbitrage despite their doubt about the idea itself. This faith enabled arbitrageurs to see simultaneously both a condition of no arbitrage and arbitrage opportunities here and elsewhere in the future. This simultaneous viewing of “no longer” and “not yet” replicated the way the idea of no arbitrage preconditioned and enabled their arbitrage operations. In indigenous Fijian gift giving the reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet” is achieved through replication of substance from social relations, to faith in God. In Japa nese arbitrage operations, the reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet” as a critical step in an operation of arbitrage was achieved through the subjunctive and circular logic of substance, that is, the notion that one would see its effects in the world if one chose to see them, and the associated ambiguation of belief in the idea of arbitrage itself. The economy of hope, or more precisely, reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet,” in all these examples, is predicated on the redefi nition of

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substance and the associated redefinition of belief. Pope Benedict replicates the material substance of property in belief. Indigenous Fijians ritually replicate the substance of hope in gifts between humans in their Christian faith. The Japanese arbitrageurs I studied replicated the “as if ” substance of the theoretical construct of no arbitrage in their subjunctive belief in the idea of arbitrage.

Obama’s Substance Substance was one of the most contentious issues during Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Throughout, Obama’s political ascendance was regularly attributed to his “style.” For his critics, Obama’s appeal to hope was nothing but evidence of what they saw as his lack of “substance,” that is, his lack of “experience” and the lack of “specificity” and “originality” in his policy proposals. No one would be able to govern the United States simply with hope. One would need concrete and effective policies (cf. Miyazaki 2008b). Over time, however, Obama seems to have proven that “he has both style and substance,” as Colin Powell put it in his endorsement of Obama’s candidacy in October 2008 (Knowlton and Zeleny 2008), and the New York Times Editorial Board reached a similar conclusion: “Mr.  Obama has met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change” (New York Times 2008c). In these endorsements, however, the opposition between style and substance remained unchanged. In response to the repeated charges of the lack of specificity and substance in his appeal to hope, in contrast, Obama sought to redefi ne what counted as substance. For example, on January 5, 2008, at the televised debate among Democratic Party contenders, Obama insisted, “Words do inspire [people],” in direct response to Hillary Clinton’s call for more “action” than “words” (New York Times 2008d). Instead of pointing to his own past “action” and “experience” in a defensive manner, here, Obama interestingly sought to remind people of the power of words. The statement seems to gesture toward Michael Silverstein’s observation, “The substance of it all . . . is style,” in his analysis of presidential speeches (2003: 5). In light of this observation, I argue that Obama did not, and did not need to, add substance to his style over time. His campaign of hope inherently entailed the reworking of the contours of substance and belief. Obama

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continued to use, and insisted on, hope. In his speech to be known later as the “Yes, We Can” speech, Obama stated, “We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope” (New York Times 2008e). Relatedly, Obama persistently insisted on the general quality of change his campaign sought. His campaign kept change general to the extent that it became personal (Miyazaki 2008a, 2008b). The equation of the general and the personal was often accomplished by rhetorical shifts from “I” to “you” and “we,” most famously exemplified by his Super Tuesday speech: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. . . . We are the hope of the future” (New York Times 2008f). In March 2008, when the controversy over Obama’s then pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s antiwhite militant sermons erupted, Obama delivered a speech on race relations, “A More Perfect Union.” In that speech, Obama revisited Wright’s expression, “the audacity of hope,” and defended the idea while criticizing Wright for rejecting the possibility of change: The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country—a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is true [sic] genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow. (New York Times 2008g) Likewise, Obama’s acceptance speech mentioned at the beginning of this chapter ended with a quote from the Letter to the Hebrews, “Hold firmly to the hope that we confess,” whereas in the victory speech delivered in Chicago on November 4, 2008, a phrase, “while we breathe, we hope,” was inserted (New York Times 2008h).

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In his inauguration speech in January 2009, Obama quoted a passage from Thomas Paine’s book that George Washington is said to have mentioned: “Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]” (New York Times 2009). Urging the American people to endure in the midst of the global financial crisis, Obama remarked, “America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fi xed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations” (ibid.). Thus Obama persistently used the word “hope” in these impor tant speeches. In each case, hope was used to trigger a reorientation from “what has already come” or what is “no longer” to “what is not yet.” The speech in New Hampshire followed a defeat in the primary there. The “race speech” was delivered in the midst of the attacks over his association with Rev. Wright. The inauguration speech responded to the historic financial crisis originating from the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. Both the acceptance speech and the victory speech sought to reorient to the future once again after the victories. In the victory speech, Obama insisted, “Victory alone is not the change we seek—it is only the chance for us to make that change.” In each case, change, hope as an ability to reorient, and “unyielding hope” were mentioned as American values, values each American needs to have. Elsewhere I have analyzed the simultaneously generalizing and personalizing tendency of Obama’s notion of belief as a defining feature of the particu lar aesthetic of substance underlying his campaign of hope (Miyazaki 2008a). As an example of this, I have mentioned will.i.am’s “Yes, We Can” song and have considered the relationship between Obama’s hope and will.i.am’s hope. What prompted will.i.am to make the video is that, according to will.i.am himself, “[Barack Obama’s speech in New Hampshire] inspired me to look inside myself and outwards towards the world. . . . It inspired me to want to change myself to better the world . . . and take a ‘leap’ towards change . . . and hope that others become inspired to do the same . . . change themselves . . . change their greed . . . change their fears . . . and if

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we  ‘change that’ ‘then hey’ . . . we got something right” (will.i.am [2009] 2011). Here Obama’s call for change inspired will.i.am to change himself. There is no way to evaluate the role of this video in the campaign in quantitative terms. But it is safe to say that it played a major role. If will.i.am’s hope was a replication of Obama’s hope, as will.i.am himself imagined, each individual who downloaded the video replicated will.i.am’s hope for his own  personal change as his or her own personal hope. In my view, Obama’s substance resided in this process of replication (Miyazaki 2008a, 2008b). During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama’s website, www .barackobama.com, prominently displayed the following message: “I am asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington . . . I am asking you to believe in yours.” I argue that such replication of hope, that is, reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet,” in specific individuals was triggered by the redefinition of belief (as seen in the above quote) and the associated redefinition of what counts as substance. Like belief, substance became personal. If Obama’s campaign made an act of believing personal, substance also became personal (Miyazaki 2008a, 2008b). The source of the support for Obama was diverse but perhaps it consisted of such diverse manifestations of replicated hope and substance. Here the opposition of style and substance was obviated by redefinition of the subject of substance. The personal was made into the substance of hope and in turn paradoxically gave forcefulness to “belief ” and “hope” so that Obama might trump the opposition between the secular and the sacred as well. The victory speech Obama delivered on the evening of Election Day in Chicago explicitly initiates yet another reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet”: “This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change” (New York Times 2008h). In proclaiming that “while we breathe, we hope” at the end of this speech, Obama brings into view “unyielding hope,” that is, a persistent commitment to reorientation from “no longer” to “not yet,” as one of the American virtues parallel to democracy and liberty: “That’s the true genius of America, that American can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.” As they listened to Obama that evening, many people, in the United States and around the world, cried. But I do not believe they cried simply

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because of his style or substance. In crying, they became the substance of their own hope. Following his election, however, Obama’s hope perhaps began to lose this par ticu lar specificity. In the midst of the historic global fi nancial crisis, the need for hope was badly felt. On April  10, 2009, President Barack Obama remarked, “What you’re starting to see is glimmers of hope across the economy” (Fletcher 2009). What was the source of those glimmers of hope? Was it the new personal ties across the nation that Obama’s campaign sought to create? Was it the “real” economy as opposed to the virtual financial economy? Here Obama stopped short of clarifying the substance of this hope. During the first four years of Obama’s presidency, the rhetoric of hope indeed retreated to the background, and there was a growing sense of disappointment even among his original supporters. Yet he returned to the theme of hope in his speech at the 2012 National Democratic Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 6, 2012. “Ours is a future fi lled with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11), he quoted from the Book of Jeremiah toward the end of the speech. In this speech, he once again sought to redefine the substance of the hope he was assumed by many to embody four years before: “As I stand here tonight, I have never been more hopeful about America. Not because I think I have all the answers. Not because I’m naïve about the magnitude of our challenges. I’m hopeful because of you” (New York Times 2012). After mentioning stories of several people he had met in various American towns, he stated that these people (and their stories) had given him hope: “I don’t know what party these men and women belong to. I don’t know if they’ll vote for me. But I know that their spirit defines us. They remind me, in the words of Scripture, that ours is a ‘ future fi lled with hope.’ ” In evoking the notion of Amer ica as a promised land, Obama once again sought to make each American personal story emerge as the substance of American hope. The message is consistent with and replicates the kind of hope and its reorientation effectuated in the 2008 campaign: It is not Obama himself who is the substance of American hope. In the context of the argument put forward in this volume, it is precisely the power of reorientation (in this instance another reorientation from Obama to each individual citizen) that in Obama’s vision should serve as the substance of that hope. In other words, the redefinition of hope’s substance, that is, the reformulation of the rational for yet another reorientation, is a key element

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of the economy of hope. Despite the pervasive disappointment in Obama and his presidency eight years after his first presidential campaign of hope, I suggest that his contribution to the American economy of hope remains precisely in his repeated invitations to reorient ourselves, to endure one more time, and hope.

Notes An earlier version of this chapter was presented at Georgetown University on November 14, 2008. A Japanese-language version of a portion of the chapter has appeared as “Obama no kibo: ‘Mo-nai’ kara ‘mada-nai’ e” [Obama’s hope: From “no longer” to “not yet”], Kibogaku [Hope studies], vol. 4, Kibo no hajimari: Ryudokasuru sekai de [The beginnings of hope: In an increasingly more fluid world], ed. University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, Yuji Genda, and Shigeki Uno, 3–26, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2009. 1. In this chapter, all references to the scriptures are based on the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. 2. The following passages are found in Hebrews 6: “And we want each one of you to show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope to the very end” (Hebrews 6:11); and “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain” (Hebrews 6:19). Hope is based on God’s firm promise (see Long 1997: 78–80). 3. A consideration of the religious dimensions of Obama’s hope situates the heightened interest in the subject of hope in Euro-American social theory in the broader effort to reconsider the relationship between the secular and the sacred. That historically the secular and the sacred have always been in tension, and that the distinction between the two has been maintained strategically, is now fairly well accepted (see, e.g., Asad 2003; Cannell 2005, 2006; Robbins and Engelke 2010). In that sense, the “secular” and “sacred” have never existed as distinctive categories. From this perspective, social scientific knowledge itself stands at the intersection of the secular and the sacred, and the maintenance of the secular character of social scientific knowledge has demanded conscious work and effort. In other words, approaching the religious from a social scientific point of view begins with an awareness of the tension between the secular and the sacred as itself a common basis of both secular and religious ways of knowing. Hope emerges precisely in the midst of this tension. 4. As the theologian Thomas G. Long points out in his commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews, the word “hypostasis” is deployed earlier (Hebrews 1:3) to indicate that Christ is a manifestation of “God’s ‘very being’ ” (Long 1997: 113): “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his

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powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs” (Hebrews 1:3–4). 5. John Cottingham has proposed to translate the term “hypostasis” differently. According to him, the term should be translated as “support” rather than “substance”: “[The term] is sometimes translated ‘substance’—faith is the ‘substance of things hoped for.’ But that makes it sound, to my ear, far too theologically settled and solid” (Cottingham 2016: 20). In his view, “an act of faith or trust can often be epistemically facilitating; it puts us into a mode of receptivity . . . , thereby opening us to the possibility of perceiving evidence that, if all goes well, will later confirm the appropriateness of the original trust” (ibid., 20–21). Cottingham’s translation makes the passage in question less deterministic and more open-ended in contrast to Pope Benedict’s rendition and resonates with my analysis of Obama’s conception of belief and hope.

References Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benedict XVI. 2007. “Encyclical Letter, Spe Salvi, of the Supreme Pontiff Benedict to the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, Men and Women Religious and All the Lay Faithful on Christian Hope.” Libreria Editrice Vaticana, November 30. http://www .vatican .va / holy_ father/ benedict _ xvi /encyclicals /documents / hf _ ben -xvi _ enc _ 20071130_ spe-salvi _en.html. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beunza, Daniel, and David Stark. 2004. “Tools of the Trade: The Socio-technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street Trading Room.” Industrial and Corporate Change 13(2): 369–400. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cannell, Fenella. 2005. “The Christianity of Anthropology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 11(2): 335–56. ———, ed. 2006. The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cottingham, John. 2016. “Hope and the Virtues.” In Hope: Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2014, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Block, 13–31. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck. Fletcher, Michael A. 2009. “On Economy, Obama Sees Glimmers of Hope and Signs of Progress.” Washington Post, April 10. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009 /04/10/on _economy_obama _ sees _ glimmers.html.

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Kasuga, Naoki. 1999. “Tochi wa naze shuchaku wo umunoka? Fiji no rekishi to genzai wo tsujite kangaeru” [Why does land engender persistent attachment? From the viewpoint of Fiji’s past and present]. In Tochi shoyu no seiji-shi: jinruigaku-teki shiten [The political history of land ownership: Anthropological perspectives], ed. Takashi Sugishima, 371–89. Tokyo: Fukyo-sha. Knowlton, Brian, and Jeff Zeleny. 2008. “Colin Powell Breaks with Party and Endorses Obama.” New York Times, October 19. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/world /americas/19iht-19powell.17079944.html. Long, Thomas G. 1997. Hebrews. Louisville, KY: John Knox. MacKenzie, Donald. 2006. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2006. “Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques.” Cultural Anthropology 21(2): 147–72. ———. 2007. “Between Arbitrage and Speculation: An Economy of Belief and Doubt.” Economy and Society 36(3): 396–415. ———. 2008a. “Barack Obama’s Campaign of Hope: Unifying the General and the Personal.” Anthropology News 49(8): 5, 8. ———. 2008b. “Sen. Obama’s Policy of Hope.” Op-ed column. Ithaca Journal, February 29. ———. 2013. Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance. Berkeley: University of California Press. New York Times. 2008a. “Barack Obama’s Acceptance Speech.” August 28. http://www .nytimes.com/2008/08/28/us/politics/28text-obama.html. ———. 2008b. “Barack Obama’s Caucus Speech.” January 3. http://www.nytimes.com /2008/01/03/us/politics/03obama-transcript.html. ———. 2008c. “Barack Obama for President.” October 24. http://www.nytimes.com /2008/10/24/opinion/24fri1.html. ———. 2008d. “The Democratic Debate in New Hampshire.” January 5. http://www .nytimes.com/2008/01/05/us/politics/05text-ddebate.html. ———. 2008e. “Barack Obama’s New Hampshire Primary Speech.” January 8. http:// www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/us/politics/08text-obama.html. ———. 2008f. “Barack Obama’s Feb. 5 Speech.” February 5. http://www.nytimes.com /2008/02/05/us/politics/05text-obama.html. ———. 2008g. “Barack Obama’s Speech on Race.” March 18. http://www.nytimes.com /2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html. ———. 2008h. “Obama’s Victory Speech.” November 5. http://www.nytimes.com /2008/11/04/us/politics/04text-obama.html. ———. 2009. “Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address.” January 20. http://www.nytimes .com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html.

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———. 2012. “President Obama’s Full Remarks from the Democratic National Convention.” September 6. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/us/politics/president -obamas-full-remarks-from-the-democratic-national-convention.html. Obama, Barack. 2006. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. New York: Crown. Ratzinger, Joseph. [1985] 2008. “On Hope.” Communio 35(2): 301–15. [Originally published in Communio 12(1): 71–84.] Robbins, Joel, and Matthew Engelke. 2010 “Introduction.” South Atlantic Quarterly 109(4): 623–31. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to “W.” Chicago: Prickly Paradigm. will.i.am. [2009] 2011. “Why I Recorded Yes We Can.” Huffington Post, January 9, 2009. http://www.huffi ngtonpost .com /william /why-i-recorded-yes -we -can _ b _ 84655 .html.

CON TRIBU TOR S

Yuji Genda is Professor at the Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo. He is the author of A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity (2005) and many other books on youth and employment issues. Jane I. Guyer is Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Johns Hopkins University. She moved there in 2002 from her position as Director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (2004) and other books and articles on money and livelihood. Hirokazu Miyazaki is Director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, John S. Knight Professor of International Studies, and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is the author of The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge (2004) and Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance (2013). Annelise Riles is the Jack  G. Clarke Professor of Far East Legal Studies, Director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture, and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. She is the author of The Network Inside Out (2000, winner of the American Society of International Law’s Certificate of Merit for 2000–2002) and Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (2011), and the editor of Rethinking the Masters of Comparative Law (2001) and Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge (2006). Richard Swedberg is Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, formerly at the University of Stockholm. He is the author of Principles of Economic Sociology (2003), The Art of Social Theory (2014), and numerous other books on economic sociology and social theory.

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Katherine Verdery is the Julien J. Studley Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Transylvanian Villagers (1983), National Ideology Under Socialism (1991), What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (1996), The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (1999), The Vanishing Hectare (2003, winner of the J. I. Staley Prize), Peasants Under Siege (2011, with Gail Kligman), and Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police (2014).

INDEX

Abenomics, 4, 27 Abeyance. See under Agency Abstraction, 135 Action: and the agency of others, 136; and the concept of lateness, 115–16, 123; economic, 177–79; judicial, 140; the relationship between hope and, 40, 46–48, 90, 98, 101, 162; ritual, 150, 157, 163; social, 11; and time, 133, 162 Agency: abeyance of, 23, 29, 136–37, 150, 163–64, 166; distribution of, 151; human, 151, 164, 176; instrumentalization of, 126; political agency in law, 19, 135–38, 140; in ritual, 150, 153, 164; transformation of agency in socialist Romania, 14, 79, 90–93 Aging and health, 102–3 Akiwowo, Akinsola, 156 Alingsås, manufacturing works at, 69–72 Allison, Anne, 4, 16, 107 Alströmer, Jonas, 69–70 Aluko, Jones O., 164–66 Ambivalence, 6, 28, 116–17, 120, 131 Anthropology, 31n4, 94, 160–61; of per formance, 160–61; of socialism, 94 Anticipation, 25, 150–51, 166–67, 179 Arbitrage, 117, 179–81; compared with speculation, 117, 180; condition of “no arbitrage,” 179–80 Archival research, 79, 84 Artisanal production, 24, 70, 146–48, 157, 159, 163 “As if,” 19, 129–34, 136–41, 143n7, 179–81 Australia, 5 Barber, Karin, 159–64, 168n3 Bauman, Zygmund, 43 Belief, 2, 26, 131, 139, 173–76, 179–84, 187n5; circular, 180

Benedict XVI, 26, 173–81, 187n5 Benjamin, Walter, 161 Bentham, Jeremy, 130, 132, 135 Berch, Anders, 56–60 Berlant, Lauren, 3, 173 Bloch, Ernst, 3, 8–9, 28, 161, 166, 174–77 Blockage (heisokukan), 4–7, 16, 27–30 Brinton, Mary, 16, 108 Cadres (of the Romanian Communist Party), 13–14, 78–94 Calvinism, 164 Cameralism, in eighteenth-century Sweden, 56, 58, 64, 65 Capitalism, 21, 126, 129, 168n2; “As if” quality of global, 133; soft, 8; the spirit of, 164 Chiaburi (Romanian peasants), 14, 79–80, 86–93, 95nn2–8; contestations of Chiaburi designation, 88–89, 95n8 Christianity: Calvinism, 164; as foundation of America, 173, 176; lotu (Fijian form of Christian belief), 177–78; Lutheranism in eighteenth-century Sweden, 53, 62–63; Pentecostalism in West Africa, 166–67; Protestant African American churches, 173; Roman Catholicism, 173 Class warfare, 79, 84–87 Clinton, Hillary, 181 Closure, 3, 4, 11, 23, 160–61; denial of, 160 Cohen, Morris, 18–23, 134–37, 144n11 Collectivization, 13, 79–84; peasant opposition to, 81 Cominform Conference (1948), 80 Communism, 6, 13–14, 21, 77–83, 94; collapse of, 14, 21, 77, 94; in Romania, 6, 79–82, 83 Consumer confidence, 41–42

194

Index

Corporation as a person, 18, 134, 137–39 Crisis. See Economic crisis Dahrendorf, Ralf, 40–41 Dechiaburization, 87–88, 91–92, 93 De la Gardie, Eva, 74 Deleuze, Gilles, 150, 156, 161 Democratic National Convention (2008), 172 Democratic National Convention (2012), 185 Derham, William, 62 Despair, 3, 38, 90, 107, 167, 168n5. See also Hope Development. See Economic development Disappointment: as an engine of further hope, 134; of Fijians in relation to development projects, 178; in the Obama presidency, 26, 186; with socialism, 13, 20, 22; of young people 107, 111 Divination, 24–25, 153–54, 163–64, 166–67, 167–68n1 Dream: the American, 48; economic, 11, 27, 47, 61, 72–73, 133; for the future, 98, 109–12; unrealistic, 16–17 Drucker, Peter, 7–8 Durkheim, Emile, 39, 45 Economic crisis, 2, 5, 25, 27, 72, 147, 174, 183, 185 Economic decline, 16, 121 Economic development, 4, 6, 53, 54–55, 147 Economic growth: in eighteenth-century Sweden, 54–56, 58; of the Japa nese economy, 4, 6–7, 21, 27, 99, 103, 121–22; lack of the concept of, 64; perpetual, 21 Economic niche, 2, 10, 24, 157 Economics: home, 52, 58; Linnean, 55–56, 62, 64–65, 67–68; mercantilist, 26, 51, 53, 57, 58, 60, 65; modern, 52, 179; Swedish professorships in, 56, 58, 65, 67; typology of, 52 Economy: artisanal, 24, 163; “economy of hope” concept, 2–11, 26–27, 30n2, 177, 180–81, 185–86; as householding, 11, 51–57; informal, 147–48, 167; “Japanization” of the U.S. and European economies, 30–31n3; market, 4, 5, 13, 15, 24, 55, 78, 117–18, 122. See also Japa nese economy

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (T. S.), 162, 168n4 Entrepreneurship, 23, 24–25, 38, 47, 48, 166, 168n2 Esu (Yoruba divinity), 153–54 Exodus, 4–5, 28–29, 30n1 Faggot, Jacob, 60 Faith, 25, 26, 29, 126, 149, 172, 174–82, 187n5; as distinguished from hope, 172, 174–76; in knowledge, 10, 29; loss of, 10; as substance, 174–82 Fayemi, Kayode, 149 Fiction: arbitrage as, 179; hope as, 118–20; hope in, 26–30, 127. See also Legal fiction Fiji, 23, 25, 30n2, 174, 177–78, 180–81 Financial crisis. See Economic crisis Financial traders, 5, 117, 137, 144n10, 170, 179–80 Forward momentum through life. See Prospective momentum Frank, Jerome, 130, 143n6 Freeters, 6, 16, 102, 115, 126, 127, 142n1 Friendship, 17, 105, 107–8, 118. See also Weak ties Fukushima Daiichi disaster, 1, 4, 7, 10, 26, 27, 29, 31n5 Fuller, Lon, 128, 132, 140, 143n6 Futurity: communist, 78, 83, 93; and imagination, 6, 25, 78, 83–84, 107, 114, 118, 134; near, 5, 24, 26–27, 148; “thousand moments” version of, 166–67. See also Blockage Global fi nancial crisis (2008), 184–85 Gospodării Agricole Colective (GACs), 80–83 Gospodării Agricole de Stat (GASs), 80 Graunt, John, 57 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, 1, 10, 16, 27, 109 Habermas, Jürgen, 40 Habitus, 174–75 Hage, Ghassan, 3, 5, 126–27, 138 Hannoun, Charley, 133 Happiness (in relation to hope), 39, 99, 104, 107, 120, 122 Harvey, David, 5, 21, 22, 79 Hats (political party), 64, 69, 71–72

Index

195

Involution, 147 Ishikura, Yoshihiro, 113

Heckscher, Eli, 51, 54, 55–57, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74 Heisokukan. See Blockage Heroism, 5, 9, 11, 27–30, 31n5 Hikikomori (recluses in Japan), 16 Hirowatari, Seigo, 97–98, 107, 118–120 Hirschman, Albert, 11, 47 Hope: absence of, 2, 6, 18, 43, 123; achievable, 10, 11, 40–41, 182; ambiguous, 3, 7, 17, 123; atheistic formulations of, 176–77; children’s, 28–29, 106–7, 110; collective, 2, 5, 6–7, 13–14, 15, 51; as a collective good, 45; and crisis, 1, 2, 5, 27, 147, 148, 183, 185; and crisis in social theory, 126–27, 138; dark, 11, 26–27, 29–30, 32n7, 162; effective, 11, 40; failure of, 26, 78, 107, 112; loss of, 3–7, 10, 14–18, 21, 22, 29, 97, 106, 107, 112, 113, 118, 122–23; manipulation of, 82, 87; as means and ends, 18, 30n2, 77–78, 83, 90–91, 131–32, 141, 142n2; methodological challenges in locating, 11, 13, 93, 150–51; methodological implications of, 3–4, 20, 21; and narrative fluidity, 28; non-market based forms of, 78, 94, 122; paradoxical, 3, 7, 10, 29, 149, 179, 184; practical, 3, 20, 40; radical, 9, 128; realistic, 2, 11, 15, 16, 40–41; in relation to income, 100–104, 109, 113, 115–16, 118; in relation to personal occupation, 110, 155; scholarly, 127; as social fact, 45, 47, 48, 49; sociology of, 11, 20, 37–38, 48, 108, 109; spaces of, 10, 14, 15, 18, 21–22, 24–25, 79, 93, 153, 155–57; as story, 17–18, 19, 21, 119–23; temporality of, 2, 151, 173–74, 176, 179; as wish, 17, 42–47, 97–98, 127. See also Disappointment; Reorientation; Replication Hopelessness, 21, 45–49, 103, 118, 142 Hyparchonta, 175 Hypostasis, 174–75, 186n4, 187n5

Kamaishi city, Iwate, 16, 109, 122 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 143n8 Kasuga, Naoki, 115, 126, 127, 142, 178 Katona, George, 41 “Keeping on going.” See Prospective momentum Kibogaku. See Japa nese Hope Studies Kierkegaard, Søren, 45 Knight, Frank, 43 Knowledge: directionality of, 9, 142; legal, 18–20; in relation to hope, 3, 7, 10–11, 20, 22–23, 31n4, 64–65, 78, 101, 128, 152, 156, 160. See also Reorientation Knowledge economy, 7–10, 31 Kojien. See Representation Kopytoff, Igor, 155–56 Kurusu, Saburo, 118–19

Ifa (Yoruba divinity), 154–55, 163–64 Implied warranty of habitability, 139–40 Indeterminacy, 9, 127, 154; in Yoruba thought, 154 Infertility treatment clinics, 113–14 Instrumentalism, 18, 22, 44, 126–32, 143n8, 167; capitalist overinstrumentalism, 126–27; hopeful quality of, 22, 132; of the social sciences, 127

Lampland, Martha, 85 Lăţea, Daniel, 83–84, 92 Lateness, 113, 115–16 Law, 2, 18–19, 22, 118–19, 127–42, 143nn5–6, 163, 179; agentive power of, 18–19, 22, 129, 138, 140–41; economic, 2, 18, 53, 128, 132–33; as a hopeful discipline, 127 Leach, Edmund, 131

Japan: conditions of hopefulness in, 97–123; demographic shifts in, 16, 27, 97, 101–14; Japa nese debate about hope, 4–7, 10, 15–18, 21, 30n1; near-future depiction of Japan in Yoko Tawada’s Kentoshi, 26–30; post-Fukushima, 31n5; technoscientific advancement in, 30–31n3. See also Aribitrage; Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami; Japa nese economy; Japa nese Hope Studies Japa nese economy, 2, 4–7, 15–18, 21, 27; Abenomics, 4, 27; the lost decade, 4–5, 101, 103; neoliberal reform (itami wo tomonau kaikaku), 2, 4–7, 15, 17–18, 21, 27; post-war growth, 4, 6, 7 Japa nese Hope Studies, 97, 98–99, 104, 109, 113–14, 118, 122–23, 126–27 Johannisson, Karin, 60, 73 Judges. See Agency

196

Index

Lear, Jonathan, 9, 128 Legal fiction, 2, 10, 18–20, 22–23, 129–42, 142nn2–4, 143nn5–8, 144nn9–11, 179; afterlife of, 141; epistemological status of, 18, 129–31, 134–36 Legal knowledge, 18–20, 22, 133, 136–37, 139, 141–42; routinized aspect of, 19, 22, 137 Letter to the Hebrews, 172–75, 178, 182, 186–87n4 Liminality, 150, 153, 156, 159 Linné, Carl von (Linnaeus), 55, 56, 61–73 Linné’s “apostles,” 67 Linné’s “scientific trips,” 65–66 Loneliness, 104–5, 114 Long, Peter, 186–87n4 Luther, Martin, 175 Lutheranism. See under Christianity Maccoby, Hyam, 161 Maine, Henry, 130, 132, 143n5 Malthus, Thomas, 72–73 Mana, 177–78 Manufactories (manufakturer), 12–13, 54–56, 64, 66, 67–73; compared with industrial production, 68 Marcel, Gabriel, 3 Marcuse, Herbert, 40 Mattingly, Cheryl, 3 Mercantilism, 26, 51, 53, 57, 58, 60, 65. See also under Sweden Mimesis. See Replication Mitchell, Oliver, 135 Murakami, Ryu, 1, 4–11, 26–30, 30n1, 99, 127; “Amid Shortages, a Surplus of Hope” article, 1; emphasis of knowledge over hope, 7, 10; Kibo no kuni no ekusodasu (Exodus from a Country of Hope, book), 4, 30n1 NEETs (people Not in Education, Employment, or Training), 6, 16, 102, 106, 121 Neoliberalism, 2, 4–7, 15, 17–18, 21, 27, 94, 166, 168n2 Nigeria, 24–25, 148–49, 157, 166; feeding cities in, 148 Nitta, Michio, 118 Nollywood, 148 “Not yet,” 4, 8, 25–26, 174–79, 180, 183–84; as analogue for God, 176

Obama, Barack, 2, 25–26, 172–74, 181–86, 186n3, 187n5; “A More Perfect Union” speech, 182; The Audacity of Hope (book), 173; “The Audacity of Hope” speech, 173, 182; “Yes, We Can” speech, 182 Occupational niche, 157–58 Office of Tables (Sweden), 12, 61, 72–74 Openness, 3, 4, 11, 23, 25–30, 101, 160–61 Optimism: among Africans, 149, 160–61; agricultural, 55; in Barack Obama’s political rhetoric, 173; Candidean, 62; cruel, 3; of the intellect, 22; reasoned, 39; as a subtype of hope, 2; utopian optimism in eighteenth-century Sweden, 11–12, 26, 55, 57, 59–60; Zetterberg’s survey approach to, 41–42 Osomalo traders, 164–66, 167 Passivity, 3, 45, 46, 48 Peasantry, 13–14, 26, 47, 53, 54, 72, 74, 79–93, 95n2, 147; in eighteenth-century Sweden (hemslöjd), 53, 54, 72, 74; in twentieth-century Romania, 13–14, 26, 79–93, 95n2 Pentecostalism. See under Christianity Persuasion work, 79–84, 92–93 Petitions, 10, 14, 88, 91–93 Petty, William, 56–58, 60 Physicotheology, 62, 64 Play, 10, 11, 17–18, 20, 21, 29, 30, 116, 123, 153; in relation to waste, 10, 17–18, 21, 116 Polanyi, Karl, 168n2 Polhem, Christopher, 55–56, 70 Political arithmetic, 12, 56–58, 60, 67–68, 72–73; difference from statistics, 57–58 Pope, Alexander, 25, 151–52 Potato, 12–13, 70, 73–74 Powell, Colin, 181 Propaganda fi lms. See Persuasion work Prospective momentum, 23, 24, 25, 78–79, 92, 147–49, 160–61, 162, 166; compared with tradition, 147 Quantification, 57, 60, 155 Rationality, 7, 9, 15, 166; market, 15; scientific, 176 Ratzinger, Joseph Aloisius. See Benedict XVI

Index Reed, Adam, 30n2 Reorientation: of legal knowledge, 18, 20–21 23, 128, 131, 133, 138; as method, 9–11, 20–21, 23, 29, 74, 167; from “no longer” to “not yet,” 174–80, 183–85, 186n3; in relation to resilience, 26. See also Replication Replication: of Barack Obama’s hope in the 2008 election, 184; and the creation of newness, 24, 158; across the divide of the sacred and the secular, 177–80; hopeful mimesis in Communist Romania, 83; in legal thinking, 139–42; as method, 10–11, 20, 22–26, 134; of social forms, 150–51, 155–56, 161–62, 166 Representation, 93, 97–98, 104, 113–14, 121 Resilience, 24–26, 91, 147–52, 155, 161–62, 166. See also Prospective momentum Ricoeur, Paul, 3 Risk, 7, 94, 107, 115–17, 167, 180 Ritual, 23, 119, 150, 153–54, 163–64, 178, 181; Fijian, 23, 119, 178, 181; Yoruban, 153–54, 163 Ritual kinship, 85, 87, 89, 90 Robbins, Joel, 2, 186n3 Roman Catholicism. See under Christianity Romania: ritual kinship in, 85, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94–95n1; Soviet-style socialism in, 6, 79–82, 83; “visibility” in Romanian rural life, 85. See also Collectivization Röpke, Wilhelm, 133 Rorty, Richard, 8–9 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 55, 57–61, 70, 74; compared with other European scientific societies, 55 Runeberg, E. O., 60 “The sacred” (compared with “the secular”), 173–74, 177, 184, 186n3 Samuel, Geoff rey, 129 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 46 Sato, Iwao, 119 Sato, Kaoru, 113, 114–15 Schlag, Pierre, 139, 141 Self-exploitation, 147 Setbacks, 17, 111–14, 116, 120–22 Silverstein, Michael, 181 Socialism, 13, 15, 77–79, 82, 94; actually existing, 78 Sociology, 38, 40, 108, 119

197

Stagnation. See Blockage Statistics, 13, 55, 57, 72–73 Stolzenberg, Nomi, 132, 143n4 Strategic thinking (kakehiki), 32n7 Strong ties. See Weak ties Substance, 2, 10–11, 26, 173–81, 183–85, 187n5; faith as, 174–77, 187n5; gifts as, 177–79, 181; versus style, 181, 184–85 Suicide, 39 Sunstein, Cass, 130 Sweden: Age of Empire (Stormaktstiden) in, 52–53; Age of Freedom (Frihetstiden) in, 53, 55; cultivation of silk in, 51, 67–69, 70–71, 72; economy as household in, 51–53, 55, 56–59, 65–66, 72; iron industry in, 68, 73; mercantilist-utopianism in, 2, 11–12, 26, 51–53, 73–74. See also Christianity; Economics; Manufactories Swedenborg, Emanuel, 56 Taneda, Santoka, 114 Tawada, Yoko, 10–11, 26–30, 31n6, 32n7 Temporality: of Christian hope, 173–76, 179; of financial trading, 133–34, 150–52, 179; millenarian-messianic, 78, 161–63, 166–67; of Nigerian entrepreneurship and divination, 24–25, 150, 157, 167, 167–68n1, 168nn2–3; of “not-yet,” 173–76, 179; of ritual, 23, 150–51, 157, 159 Thomas, Yan, 128–29, 141, 142n4 Th rift, Nigel, 8, 31n4 Time: directionality of, 79, 133–34; lineality of, 79; messianic, 161, 166–67; “timescape,” 161 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 37–39 Trading. See Financial traders; Osomalo traders Turner, Victor, 150, 156–57, 159, 161, 163 Tutuola, Amos, 164 Uncertainty, 4, 7–9, 31, 43, 94, 117, 132 Uno, Shigeki, 113, 115–16 Urs von Balthasar, Hans, 31n5 Utopianism: in Communist Romania, 11, 13–15, 77–78, 82, 93; in eighteenthcentury Sweden, 2, 11–13, 20–21, 26, 51, 53, 60, 73–74; in Japan’s neoliberal reform, 15–17; “utopian hope” in contrast with “realistic hope,” 40

198

Index

Vaihinger, Hans, 18–19, 130–32, 134–37, 141, 143nn6–8 Van Gennep, Arnold, 150, 153–54, 164 Vanua (Fijian concept of “land” and “people”), 177–78 Verran, Helen, 158, 160 Wagner, Roy, 131, 140–41, 143nn7–8 Waiting, 23, 83, 92, 112–13, 115–17, 172, 175, 177, 178, 182 Wargentin, Pehr Wilhelm, 55, 73 Washida, Kiyokazu, 115 Wastefulness, 10, 17, 21, 26, 51, 72, 115–17, 120–22 Weak ties, 17, 108–9; versus strong ties, 17, 108 Weber, Max, 38–39, 58, 161–62, 164

West Africa, 2, 24–25, 147–49, 151–53, 159, 167–68n1 Will.i.am, 183, 184 Wishing, 9, 17, 42–45, 47, 49, 97–98, 119–20, 127–28 Wordplay, 28–29 Wright, Jeremiah, 173, 182–83 Yamada, Masahiro, 6, 99 “Yes, We Can” (song), 183. For the speech by Barack Obama, see under Obama, Barack Yoruba: “deep” Yoruban, 153; notions of absence, 153, 162; popu lar theater, 159; religious thought, 153, 167–68n1; “unity” and “plurality,” 158. See also Divination Zetterberg, Hans, 41