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Short Abstract
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The shocks that disrupted global supply chains in 2022 attest to how logistics is the backbone of the neoliberal economy. Logistics, with its infrastructures connecting marginal and central spaces, as well as its representations and practices that characterise it, turns out to be a “total social fact”, whose developments play the role of analyser of the contemporary world. The panel aims to discuss how anthropology can interpret logistics critically linking past, present and future.
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Long Abstract
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The shocks that disrupted global supply chains in 2022, as related to the Covid pandemic as to the war in Ukraine, attest to how logistics infrastructure is – consistent with what Marx prophetically anticipated – the backbone of the neoliberal economy (Cowen 2014). Marginal in media representation, relegated to engineering or management, logistics have only recently come to the forefront of anthropological research (Aung 2021), focusing on some issues such as the visibility of infrastructure mega-projects or digital surveillance (Delfanti 2021). Logistic state, logistical turn, logistical order are some of the words generated in the last decade. Logistics, connecting marginal and central spaces, turns out to be a “total social fact”, whose developments can be an analyser of the processes that govern it. Space is invested by dynamics of transformation that continue to make it a fundamental variable in the contemporary operations of capital (Mezzadra 2021). However, rather than focusing exclusively on a local level, this panel wants to analyse the different temporalities and the multiscalar spatiality related to logistics and its “politics of circulation” (Escobar et al. 2022). We are looking for explorations that – through an ethnographic lens, at the intersection of the anthropology of mobilities and the social analysis of material culture, labour and infrastructure – are able of interpreting logistics crises within an encompassing framework of “contemporaneity” that critically connects the past and the future (Agamben 2010), both at a theoretical and an applied level: what interpretative challenges does the anthropological study of logistics entail? What spatio-temporal dimensions does this total social fact show? The sites of logistics central to the neoliberal economy are often “heterotopic” spaces where technological advancements are appended to the exploitation of bodies. How do they function? Which hierarchies erode or consolidate the system of which logistics is the effect and matrix?
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