- Editors' Note
In two of the three sections that make up this issue of the journal, we consider contemporary challenges facing the production of humanistic knowledge in the discipline of anthropology and in the global humanities. Before that, we examine a rather different set of challenges, reflecting on the importance of food and subsistence to the making of modern and contemporary political life.
Recent events from India to Venezuela remind of us of the crucial interface between the management of poverty and precarious life, on the one hand, and projects of social engineering and welfarism on the other. The essays in the section "The Politics of Food" underscore the significance of food, farming, and fishing in the constitution of the biopolitical subject.
Jennifer Lee Johnson's ethnographic exploration of eating and existence draws our attention to counternarratives of death and collapse in popular and policy accounts of Lake Victoria's fisheries. Focusing on the Black Winter of 1860–61, Ranin Kazemi's study of famine in Iran explores how warfare and the rise of a new form of predatory capital impacted the Qajar grain market, increasing human vulnerability and producing natural and manmade disasters on a new scale. Eric Schewe explores how a wartime program to subsidize bread accelerated income inequality in rural Egypt and enabled the development of coercive technocracy in the country. Similarly, Benjamin Siegel's essay on the postindependence drive toward agricultural self-sufficiency in India argues that the focus on progressive farmers as the vanguards of agricultural production also exacerbated rural inequality and impeded development. Finally, in her essay on industrial horticulture in Egypt's arid regions, Marion Dixon shows how industrial agriculture aimed at greening the "desert frontier" has birthed an increasingly coercive and capital-intensive set of agritechnologies.
As we noted in volume 36, number 1, we will use the pages of the journal to reflect occasionally on the politics of the academy. In recent years, scholars in the United States and elsewhere have returned to the debate about the way Middle East politics shapes the possibilities for creating critical knowledge about the region. In "Middle East Politics in US Academia: The Case of Anthropology," Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar, the authors of the recently published book Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East, explore the disciplinary politics of anthropology.
This issue closes with a roundtable on the global humanities, with a range of contributions focused on the reach and relevance of the disciplinary humanities in South Asia, East Asia, the Arab world, and Africa at a moment of crisis. The discussions in this roundtable address the institutional, disciplinary, and political stakes of thinking global humanities today. [End Page 1]