Hunger in the land of plenty: The complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela

Oil-rich Venezuela is being hit by the largest crisis in living memory. Now, more than 4.8 million Venezuelans have fled the country in search of food and safety. News about migration and humanitarian aid dominate. Yet, many Venezuelans stay and seek alternative strategies to cope with scarcity and insecurity. Ad hoc solutions mainly depend on alternative economies in the borderlands that do not always fit within frameworks of human rights and rule of law, but do provide relief and produce opportunities along with new inequalities that (un)willingly sustain the crisis. Amid collapsing state infrastructures, these transborder economies tie into the global trade of basic supplies, narcotics, drugs, natural resources and human trafficking that operate in the interface of the legal and the illegal. The complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is as much about poverty and scarcity as it is about wealth and abundance benefiting only a very few. An ‘anthropology of abundance’ allows us to grasp these underlying socio-economic dynamics that turn crisis management into crisis maintenance.     

CLASS OR COMMUNITY? MARX,THE RUSSIAN COMMUNE,AND CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THEORY

This article explores the relationship between class and community through a discussion of peasant struggles and the commune during the Russian Revolution. Doing so, we show how Marx's class‐oriented reflections on community can help us to understand the role that the peasantry plays (or should play) in processes of social transformation. This enables us, first, to understand the relevance of communal forms for Marx, who believed that communitarian ways of life were crucial for overcoming a value‐based society. It is, in fact, a mistake to divide Marx's intellectual trajectory into two periods: a categorical Marx, who authored Capital and critically analyzed the classical theory of value, and a phenomenological, empirical Marx, who in the last years of his life abandoned writing Capital and focused instead on studying the Russian peasantry. Second, it enables us to discuss new externalist visions, such as postcolonial and decolonial theories, which postulate that the subordination of contemporary peasant communities is rooted in epistemology, culture, and local power relations. These theories are related to the old social‐democratic canon, which conceives of social classes as preconstituted entities and of capital as a parasitic externality that is incommensurable with social dynamics. The experience of the Russian peasantry calls into question all externalist and ontological perspectives.     

SHAPE OF THINGS: UNDERSTANDING A LOOM WEIGHT

Loom weights are common finds in archaeological excavations in Europe and the Near East. They represent the only remains of warp-weighted looms. The function of the warp-weighted loom is well known from ethnographic studies. The function of loom weights, however, has not been investigated and cannot be deduced directly from ethnographical data, since loom weights in antiquity were very different from those used in the twentieth century AD. This paper reviews the functional elements of a loom weight. The weight and thickness of loom weights are established as the defining functional parameters for the operation of the warp-weighted loom. A series of systematic tests demonstrated that the weight of a loom weight defines what yarn to use and the thread density. The thickness of a loom weight, and thus the width of the row of loom weights hanging closely together, defines the width of a fabric and – together with the weight of the loom weight – the thread count and density of the fabric. This new knowledge provides the methodological framework for archaeologists to calculate textile production possibilities from any given loom weight, as long as the weight and thickness are preserved. Furthermore, it allows scholars to assess textile production on sites where no textiles are preserved.