Tacit and embedded as forms: A tropological approach to neoliberalism

Abstract

What might we learn by considering the social and literary forms that makeup neoliberalism, and their relationship to the figurations of anthropological thought and writing? Inspired by tropological work in literary criticism and anthropology, this article considers how two terms introduced into the analytic literature by Karl and Michael Polanyi—embeddedness and tacit knowledge respectively—can give us new insights into important aspects of neoliberal practice. In considering the interrelation of these tropes, we can begin to parse out the relationship among several key aspects of the practice of neoliberalism: marketization, audit culture, and quantification; and how these are intertwined in their opposition to embeddedness and tacit knowledge. This article considers what different forms afford for analytic thinking about our present moment, as well as for formulating various protests and oppositions to neoliberalism.

Introduction: A tale of two brothers

In this article, I consider some of the forms and figures that makeup neoliberalism as an idea and as a practice and set them alongside anthropological forms and figures to suggest their possible convergences and divergences. I do so to try and get at the ways those particular forms (literary, social, and political-economic) offer potentialities and pitfall for thinking and doing. In these accusatory times in which we live, anthropological approaches, or anthropologists themselves, may be accused of sneaking neoliberalism in by the back, or even the front door. The main point of this article is that forms and figures don’t have political implications in and of themselves, but only through their interactions with other forms and figures.

I came to these questions both through a long trajectory of interest in the texts that anthropologists produce, and the tropes and other figurations of thought as a subject for anthropological study. But more recently and serendipitiously I came to these questions through my own research on food and cooking in Greece which overlapped with the period of the application of “neoliberal austerity” to Greece on the part of the European Union and its institutions. While my research was not initially focused on economics, per se, the transformation of Greek society and the community in which I had worked by what became known as the “Greek Crisis” pushed me to begin to gain a deeper understanding of neoliberalism as a political and economic project. This was at a time when Karl Polanyi's work was coming back into vogue in anthropology. Polanyi seemed particularly relevant to those seeking to understand the logics of neoliberalism, and its claims to solve social and political issues with economic, free-market solutions. It was this sense of the market as “disembedded” from society that Polanyi diagnosed so well in his critique of late 19th-/early 20th-century liberalism, that seemed to make him relevant again in understanding neoliberalism. His claim that the economy could not be seen as outside of, or separate from, culture and society was key to his “substantivist” position. Further, contemporary scholars of neoliberalism have drawn out more detailed similarities such as the “double movement” and “fictitious commodities,” which Polanyi used to diagnose classical liberalism, and which seem particularly relevant again in approaching the current neoliberal moment. ¹

Another key element of neoliberalism that is not always connected to this previous literature is its emphasis on assessments or “audit culture”—including assessing the provision of services by government and other agencies. And particularly in education, this is seen in the neoliberal idea that knowledge production and transfer are quantifiable and measurable. ² This also includes the practice of cost-benefit analysis as a way of settling public disputes in a supposedly non-political way, and the kind of accountability for knowledge implied in these processes (Fine, 1998).

I do not approach the question, of neoliberalism's approach to knowledge as a project in intellectual history, but rather out of an interest in the “tacit” and the “embedded” as forms of social/literary organization which might have particular implications. Might the kind of tacit knowledge that I have been exploring through Greek cooking be involved in the Greek responses and resistance to austerity? This would suggest a relationship between the neoliberal encouragement of the marketization of increasing aspects of society and the neoliberal practices of audit culture and the quantification of knowledge, a connection that seemed to me to be by and large underexplored in the voluminous neoliberalism literature. By the same token, it seemed that very few anthropologists who drew on Karl Polanyi were also citing, or even were aware of his brother. ³ Indeed, intellectual historians, broadly speaking, suggested that the two had little in common intellectually, particularly when it came to politics, with Karl's work on the spectrum of socialism and in dialogue with Marxist thought, and Michael more associated with “liberal” politics, perhaps even proto-neoliberal ones. Continuing down this rabbit hole one finds that both brothers, but particularly Michael, had been in dialogue with the absolute “Godfather of Neoliberalism,” Friedrich Hayek himself.

Indeed, one of the questions that intellectual historians are interested in is whether tacit knowledge was an idea that was first labeled by Polanyi and adopted by Hayek, or vice versa? Hayek, of course, was interested in tacit knowledge as a strike against the idea of state planning of the economy. It was only through the preferences, revealed in the choices of individual consumers that we could “know” the value of different goods. This must “emerge” in the market process of supply and demand, and cannot be set from the top by governments lacking access to this knowledge. For Michael Polanyi it was the discovery and apprenticeship process of science that required tacit knowledge to flourish, though not in the way that Hayek suggested for knowledge of preferences. However, his conclusion resonated with Hayek's: scientific discovery could not be mandated by the state.

It is this association of tacit knowledge with Hayek that leads anthropologist Susanne Narotzky, a leading figure in research on anti-austerity protests in Europe, to decry the concept of tacit knowledge as hopelessly politically compromised, and thus a drag on our understanding of our current political situation. As she puts it (citing both Hayek and M. Polanyi): “The basic premise of the Austrian school is the existence of dispersed (independent and autonomous) individuals possessing largely ‘tacit’ knowledge… In its central methodological assumption about how to elicit tacit knowledge through exchange, a process that will then be expressed in prices which will guide further action, this model contains some formal significant parallels with certain practices of present day (de)mobilizations and the critical theories that sustain them” (2016: 268).

So Narotzky is suggesting that there are formal parallels between the original concept of tacit knowledge derived from Polanyi and/or Hayek and current left-wing ideas and movements that also focus on the generation of tacit knowledge. It is these formal parallels that Narotzky sees as problematic, indeed she refers to this as the hegemony of form, using this as the title of her article. If we agree with Narotzky's argument, and see the hegemony of tacit form as a key aspect of neoliberalism, how do we explain the importance of audit culture, with its treatment of knowledge as explicit information, to the neoliberal project? ⁴ This is where it seems to me that we need to develop an understanding of the tacit and the emergent as forms or figures, rather than as the intellectual property of particular authors (such as Hayek), and thus valued or devalued accordingly. And it is by looking relationally at the ways certain forms are combined with others that, I will argue, we can get at the relationship between their analytical and political uses. This is where I have found the work of literary critic Caroline Levine, in what she calls, “New Formalism,” as well as my training in tropes and figures through the work of my mentor James Fernandez, to be particularly helpful, as I outline in the next section.

So, the neoliberal approach to knowledge, as explicit, measurable, and quantifiable, seemed very much the opposite of the kind of understanding I had developed in my own research on Greek cooking, where the transfer of cooking knowledge was always tied to contextualized practices, and was often tacit. While a decontextualized way of approaching knowledge has a surprisingly long history of prominence in the world of Western professional food discourse (see Sutton, 2006), the knowledge I was studying in Greece was “situated” (Lave, 2019) or embedded in the particular contexts of its use.

Michael Polanyi's notion of the significance of tacit knowledge for scientific understanding was a groundbreaking challenge to the dominant understanding of science at the time. There were other sources for my understanding of cooking as a kind of embodied, tacit knowledge. As developed by Collins (2010), it describes knowledge that cannot be specified outside of particular contexts of its acquisition or use, including the ability to improvise, and thus which cannot be replicated by AI or other artificial means. James Scott refers to this as “vernacular” rather than “official” order, which is emergent in human activity rather than synoptically planned (Scott, 2012). While Tim Ingold seems to be getting at something similar when he writes of a “sentient ecology”: “knowledge not of a formal, authorized kind, transmissible in contexts outside of its practical application. On the contrary, it is based in feeling, consisting in the skills, sensitivities and orientations that have developed through long experience of conducting one's life in a particular environment” (2000: 25). To recognize the importance of this knowledge, and its integral relationship with memory, identity, and social organization, has been an essential feature of the anthropological project that sees context and holistic understanding as central to its approach to human practices. It is also very much a part of the recent writings of indigenous scholars critiquing Western ways of knowing (e.g., Kimmerer, 2020; Yunkaporta, 2021). Tacit, situated, embodied, embedded, emergent, local—these resonant words got me wondering: were the two brothers thinking along similar lines in developing their particular contributions around “embedded” on the one hand, and “tacit” on the other? In discussing the use of tacit and explicit as “forms” in neoliberalism, I would warn against the dangers of reading distinctions between the experiences of these as reintroducing an ontological distinction between theory and practice through the back door. I am not, in this paper making claims about all tacit or all explicit knowledge, but rather questioning whether the tacit, as trope, is inherently antithetical to a critique of neoliberalism and showing how it may, in fact, be exactly that.

What forms afford

The idea that neoliberalism might be associated with certain “forms,” begs the question of what is meant by forms? James Fernandez points toward my understanding of forms in his discussion of “configurations.” He is most known for his work on metaphor, which he saw as a process of predication within a cultural “quality space,” as much part of the thinking of anthropologists as of our ethnographic interlocutors. While he was part of what he now calls the “metaphor mafia” in the 1970s (Fernandez, 2019), in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, he, along with colleagues and students of whom I count myself as one, developed an approach that took account of other tropes and figures, metonymy and irony, for example (Durham and Fernandez, 1991; Friedrich, 1991). But he also wrote of particular cultural orderings, what I would call forms, as I discuss below. These included the relations of centers and peripheries, in thought and in geography (2000), and the experience of movement and “being moved,” (Fernandez, 2014) to name a few. Working with him and with my fellow Tropologists (the term that the students of Fernandez and Paul Friedrich adopted) has always reminded me to pay attention to the ways that different cultural imaginings, which need not be only linguistic in form, take on certain shapes that give them power in particular contexts. ⁵ For Fernandez, forms like centers and peripheries can be found cross-culturally, “if only because it is an inevitable projection of crucial corporeal experiences of vital centers of the body and useful but less vital appendages, a corporeal experience which is then projected into spatial concomitants of greater or lesser vitality—or greater or lesser power” (Fernandez 2000: 118). Context matters in Fernandez's analysis, but forms, also, can travel. Similarly, Carrithers argues that “much of human cultural learning comprises the acquisition of social forms…that people apply flexibly to try to achieve their projects in the hurly-burly of ongoing events” (Carrithers, 2010: 254). This once again suggests that forms provide organization—of both ideas and practices—across contexts, while at the same time being related to specific contexts in important ways.

If the work of tropologists like Fernandez provides an important anthropological foundation for considering the question of how forms shape both our thought and experience, Caroline Levine's book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network adds some important elements to this approach. It is an intervention into debates in literary theory about the importance of formalism in literary analysis. ⁶ As such it wouldn’t be overly relevant to the goals of this article if not for several distinctive analytical moves that she makes that put her into dialogue with certain aspects of anthropological theory. Forms, for Levine, are ways of organizing human experience. They are patterns, an old, but not, perhaps completely abandoned, anthropological idea. Her first intervention is to insist on analyzing literary and social forms alongside each other, and making the case that they both meaningfully organize our shared worlds: “Literary forms and social formations are equally real in their capacity to organize materials, and equally unreal in being artificial, contingent constraints. Instead of seeking to reveal the reality suppressed by literary forms, we can understand sociopolitical life as itself composed of a plurality of different forms, from narrative to marriage, and from bureaucracy to racism” (Levine, 2015: 14).

By organizing, forms constrain. They can limit possibilities, as Levine suggests with the example that writers might see rhyming conventions as a “troublesome …bondage,” or as much anthropological work in the 1980s argued in relation to the notion of the whole and holism as a constraint on anthropological understanding. But a key concept in Levine's analysis is the idea that forms also “afford,” as in the sense of the potential, sometimes unexpected, uses latent in things. Levine suggests that we can think of forms in the same way as objects, as being put to use in different ways. A whole, by enclosing, can constrain, it can also sustain. And much of the early postmodernist anthropological critique of wholes and celebration of fragmentation (e.g., Clifford, 1988) ignored this double-sided aspect of wholes that might make them attractive to those caught up in the flows of globalization, as I argued in my work on Greek migrant food memories (Sutton, 2001). Many forms have double-sided affordances. Rhythms “on the one hand…can produce communal solidarity and bodily pleasure; on the other, they can operate as a powerful means of control and subjugation” (Levine, 2015: 49).

Levine suggests two other important qualities of forms: first, as I noted with Fernandez's work, they can travel. They can be found in many different contexts, and although these contexts are certainly important for their meaning, the stability of forms has implications for those meanings as well. The “scroll” as a form was invented with ancient codexes, and while seemingly largely having disappeared after a certain point in history, “reemerges with surprising pervasiveness in the age of the internet” (Levine, 2015: 12). Second, forms don’t work on their own, they overlap and intersect. Different forms inflect each other and might push other forms into other possible configurations offering new affordances. While this is a truism in anthropology when it comes to social forms—that kinship patterns shape and are shaped by ritual, exchange, and gender configurations, for example—we have had a tendency to use literary forms as if they worked largely on their own: tracking the significance of irony in Boas's work (Krupat, 1990) or holism in Benedict's (Handler, 1990); but rarely building an argument around the intersection and overlap of different forms, tropes or figures in anthropological writing (but see Fernandez, 1991; Friedrich, 1991). It is only in exploring the intersection and overlap of forms that we can get at their contextualized potential for different political projects. ⁷

An interesting example of the relevance of these forms to anthropological analysis, and specifically how they intersect and overlap, is provided by Caglar and Glick–Schiller's work Migrants and City-Making. One of the key aspects of their project is to critique the “methodological nationalism” of many migrant studies, which approaches migrant communities as cultural wholes. Instead, they suggest that we should analyze migrant and non-migrant lives in relation to “Multiscalar networks of power.” Multiscalar networks of power refer to the fact that these are spheres of practice that are also hierarchical: “our approach to scale is a relational one that recognizes that structures of unequal power exist within multiple…networked hierarchies.” These networks connect social fields of uneven power within which people enact “sociabilities.” As Caglar and Glick–Schiller describe it: “to construct a multiscalar analysis of daily sociabilities is to place them within the specific conjunctural configuration of multiple institutional social fields of uneven power of globe-spanning, national, regional, urban, and local institutions” (2020: 12). Note the word within in both of these quotes, which suggests the idea that these structures, and the people who work to “emplace” themselves in these networks, are also contained. These, then, are “wholes,” even if connected by networks, which afford certain possibilities even as they can also constrain. As Levine notes, some networks are contained by bounded wholes, others “crack open bounded totalities” (2015: 117). But the existence of networks does not mean we can dispense with wholes, as some postmodern analysis would suggest (Levine, 2015: 116). Indeed, they are co-constitutive.

While I will return to the “container” metaphor implied in the discussion of emplacement or embeddedness below, this example is meant to suggest the importance of seeing how analyses are made of overlapping forms, as Levine argues. Thus, in considering Narotzky's critique of the hegemony of form, in particular the “tacit” and “emergent” as enabling forms for Neoliberal politics, we should remain open to what different forms afford, especially as they come into contact, confluence, and contradiction with other forms. How do the tacit and the emergent inflect the embedded and disembedded, to bring together my two Polanyis? I will suggest some ways to begin to do that in the following section.

Considering neoliberalism

As previously noted, for the purposes of this paper I will not provide a singular, all-purpose definition of neoliberalism, but rather focus on what I would argue are two key aspects of neoliberalism: market intensification and audit culture/quantification. I choose these because they are particularly salient for an understanding of the everyday experience of neoliberalism that might lend themselves to anthropological analysis while noting that many other aspects could no doubt be identified. These two key aspects are both intensifications of previously existing social processes and relations, or as some like to put it they are “X…on steroids.” In other words, if a key component of capitalism is treating certain things as commodities that can be decontextualized, brought to market, and exchanged through price mechanisms, neoliberalism is marketization…on steroids, or the submission of increasing areas of life to market processes and market thinking (abstraction, supply and demand, and cost-benefit analysis). This is in line with the substantivist analysis the rise of the “market economy” of Polanyi, in which disembedding means taking certain processes out of their social contexts and placing them in a purely economic context. Even if we recognize that this latter is indeed a context, most anthropologists would argue that this is a strange context, one that ignores the priority of social groups and social relations over economic transactions. This spreads economic principles beyond the typical market/public sphere where it is assumed to apply to the so-called “private sphere” of personal and domestic life, the household as a business (see Foucault, 2008). This idea is epitomized in the work of economist Gary Becker, who argued for a cost-benefit economic analysis for all decisions and areas of life such as marriage and having children, or the kind of changing attitudes suggested by Airbnb and other avatars of the “sharing economy” which reflect neoliberalism's subjection of “ever greater arenas of social life…to the logic of financial calculation” (Cahill & Konings, 2017: 141).

The second aspect of neoliberalism that I’m particularly interested in here, as noted, above is audit/assessment culture, which, as a type of accounting, is also far from unique to neoliberalism. It is the essence, one could say, of bureaucratic accounting and a key part of the development of the state. Indeed, some academics who want to deny the characterization of current times as neoliberal may claim that university audit culture, for example, is simply another example of bureaucracy, which has no doubt existed for a long time in academia. Once again, what is distinctive in neoliberalism is that bureaucratic accounting is on steroids, and in a similar way to marketization, invades ever-increasing domains of social life where it previously did not exist Davies notes that this developed in full force after 1989 and the so-called triumph of capitalism, so that the neoliberal project, embraced by the ruling forces across the political spectrum, became one of “rendering market-based metrics and instruments the measure of all human worth, not only inside the market but, crucially, outside it as well” (Davies, 2016: 127). Thus, measurement and accounting not only are applied to the business of businesses, but to all levels of government, ⁸ education, medicine, policing, environmental policy, etc., as part of a general move to replace qualitative and contextual measures of success with decontextualized, quantitative measures, as Daniel Miller explores ethnographically in the case of British local council audits (Miller, 2003). Miller further notes the growth of administration which replaced “socially embedded and motivational guarantees of professionalism” with the “coercion and control” of audits. ⁹ A similar argument can be made about audit culture as applied to the classroom, and the absurdity and “anti-intellectualism” (Brown, 2021) of so-called learning outcomes. Stoller (2015) uses a Deweyan approach to argue that learning outcomes, by specifying both means and ends of learning, end up being essentially reductionist, nothing more than Taylorist management strategies. By contrast, in a Deweyan understanding of learning, context and the “emergence” of knowledge are highlighted, as Stoller puts it: “Means and ends emerge and are reconstructed simultaneously through a unified process of inquiry: they are unpredictable, emergent and context dependent. They are also inseparable in the course of lived experience” (Stoller, 2015: 324). One might even suggest that much of learning is, indeed…tacit.

With these two aspects of neoliberalism in the spotlight—marketization and audit culture—I turn now to a consideration of tacit knowledge as a form and what that might tell us about its putative relationship to neoliberalism.

Tacit and embedded: Proximate knowledge and pumpkin soup

Discussions of tacit knowledge, particularly in the fields of philosophy, intellectual history, and management studies, are quite voluminous, ¹⁰ perhaps ironically for a concept that was defined by Michael Polanyi (1966: 4) with the phrase “we know more than we can tell.” Indeed, this is not a casual irony, given that the use of the concept of tacit knowledge in the business world seems on the one hand to recognize the importance of the unspecifiable or unquantifiable, and on the other hand to attempt to, in fact, specify it. ¹¹ It is a wide matter of agreement that Polanyi's usage of the term was developed in order to combat the idea of scientific planning, accounting and “relevance” (Mirowski, 2004) by arguing that science was like many traditional skills, something that cannot be codified in explicit written discourse, but rather can only be passed on in practice from masters to apprentices, or within communities of practice. ¹² Scientific knowledge, for Polanyi, was, then, transmitted through processes similar to all culture, through socialization rather than through learning of explicit rules (Mirowski, 2004: 58). Note that from the beginning, then, in the work of Polanyi the tacit was not something that was simply information that was inaccessible or currently outside of conscious reflection. It concerned, rather, cultural practices, embodied gestures, and all the things that anthropologists have long seen as critical to understanding the ways that knowledge is connected to particular situations, times and places.

Many debates subsequent to Polanyi argue over what the concept of tacit knowledge should include, whether tacit knowledge can become explicit, or whether there is such a thing as “collective” tacit knowledge. Similarly, some want to define tacit knowledge in Hayek's sense as unconscious information made explicit through exchange, which is quite limiting for my purposes. I put these discussions aside to focus rather on the grounding Polanyi provides for thinking about tacit knowledge as a form. ¹³

Thinking of tacit knowledge as a form recognizes that it may look very different if we are focused on the tacit knowledge of how to play the piano, ride a bicycle, or hit a baseball and the tacit knowledge involved in rituals, corporate organizations, or market transactions. So what characterizes tacit knowledge? Tacit knowledge as a form is proximate, close-in, and encapsulated in people and situations; it demands that we get physical. Thus, the word tacit resonates with a number of other keywords, which are sometimes substituted and used interchangeably: embodied, situated, local, contextual, and, as I’ll discuss in detail below, embedded. These all suggest the idea of being confined to a particular place or situation. As Allen, an economic geographer, notes “tacit, culture-bound, embedded forms of knowledge merge seamlessly with spatial notions of proximity, face-to-face interaction and being-there, to give the distinct impression that knowledge, as a competitive asset, is a predominantly localized affair” (2002: 26–27). ¹⁴ Gertler (2001: 3) also suggests that it is “spatially sticky” due, in particular, to its “context-specific” nature.

Other non-spatial aspects of tacit knowledge focus on Polanyi's key phrase “we know more than we can tell” (1966: 4) to emphasize the non-codifiable, ¹⁵ or even inchoate (Mirowski, 2004: 59) dimensions of such knowledge This lends itself to a general attack on the possibility of codification found, for example, in the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold (2013), who describes tacit knowledge via Polanyi as knowledge that “grows” from “experience,” and “which adhere(s) so closely to the person of the practitioner as to remain out of reach of explication and analysis” (2013: 109). So once again, proximity is emphasized, although Ingold also uses Polanyi to criticize the notion that knowledge can be fully articulated and specified, while proposing to reserve the word “tell” for the kind of “guided rediscovery” that he sees as key to cultural learning, or the “education of attention.” Thus, Ingold claims that practitioners are not necessarily silent, but that they use their hands, bodies, and narratives to “trace a path that others can follow” rather than specifying a set of complete, abstract directions (2013: 110).

Allen (2000: 27) points specifically to the mixing of ideas of Karl and Michael Polanyi in describing how, in the world of business innovation, the tendency to argue that “…ideas which are known yet cannot be told, ways of doing things which can be shown yet not explicitly stated, favour close relations of proximity in which context is all important.” Allen goes on to claim that this latter idea owes much to Karl Polanyi's idea of “embeddedness of economic actions in social, political and cultural institutions” (Allen, 2000). Thus, the opposite of the tacit in these discussions is captured in words such as disembedded, context-less, abstract, and distanced. Allen, for example, notes what is left out of discussions that fail to take tacit knowledge into account, focusing in particular on the loss of embodied knowledge: “Images, sounds, emotions, moods and sensualities appear difficult to gauge in economic terms and, when evaluated commercially, tend to be measured by abstract criteria drawn from the outside” (Allen, 2000: 18). Anthropologist Jean Lave seems to largely avoid the term “tacit,” at least in part for its assumption that the subjects of study can’t articulate their knowledge (2019: 66 fn 6). However, she uses largely the same set of words in association with situated knowledge—context, embedded, practice—noting that “these terms substituted all too easily for one another in casual conversation” ¹⁶ (Lave, 2019: 27), and also noting a similar set of terms as the antonyms of situated: “abstract, general, universal, virtual, ¹⁷ theoretical, or otherwise distant in space and time” (Lave, 2019: 28), thus once again suggesting the proximity of situated/tacit knowledge. Like Allen, Lave is critical of these theoretical “confusions,” but for my purposes, the interesting takeaway is that they are indeed so easily substituted for one another.

Lave also points to the temporal dimensions of situated knowledge in noting that it is “everyday” knowledge, “constituted in activity, in situ” (2019: 14). James Scott uses a similar set of adjectives in describing processes of abstraction, simplification and “legibility,” all posed in relation to the complexity of “local” and “vernacular” knowledge, which is often hidden from view of those “official” organs of the state (see especially Scott, 1995, 1998). Scott's work is different from classical Geertzian anthropology insofar as he focuses comparative ethnographic attention on both sides of the dichotomy—on the abstract, distanced, and universal as well as the local and situated. Whatever term he uses for the proximate term, he insists throughout that this is knowledge that cannot be codified or fully specified explicitly outside of contexts of practice (Scott, 1995, 1998: 316). Scott continuously stresses in contrast to this knowledge at hand, what he calls “synoptic vision,” that is, a seeing from afar and outside as a key to projects of legibility.

One key aspect of the tacit, then, seems to be a container metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 2008: 92 ff), in which tacit knowledge is contained in something else: the place, situation, body, person, or context. This fits with the ways that tacit is opposed to those terms, noted above, which suggest not only distancing and transferability of knowledge, but, hence, separability from particular contexts through processes of codification and abstraction. It also fits with the metaphor of “embedded,” as noted above in Allen's complaint, since to be embedded is to be inside of something else. Block claims that the metaphor of embeddedness may have been drawn by Karl Polanyi from his knowledge of coal mining (cited in Peck, 2013: 1540), suggesting that a mine contains coal, though deeply embedded in the earth. But this raises key questions about part-whole relations. If we take Dale's description of embeddedness as “a metaphor denoting a state of dependence upon or subordination to” (2010: 189), then Polanyi's insight into (neo)liberalism becomes the reversal of part and whole: instead of an economy embedded in society, “social relationships ‘were now embedded in the economic system’” (Dale, 2010: 193; emphasis in original).

Some note that the metaphor of embeddedness as deployed by Karl Polanyi is problematic because it first separates the economy and then re-embeds it in society, while suggesting the possibility of disembedding (in liberal or neoliberal schemes). Peck argues that Polanyi avoided this problem by treating markets as “‘real’ and ‘instituted’ structures, not in the shadow of idealized abstractions” (2013: 1541). He uses the term “thick description” (Peck, 2016: 228) to describe Polanyi's approach, quoting Polanyi to the effect that the point was to study “the place occupied by the economy in society as a whole, in other words, the changing relation of the economic to the noneconomic institutions in society” (Polanyi, cited in Peck, 2016). It is notable that Lave is critical of the container metaphor for knowledge—especially that of knowledge being contained within the head—for similar reasons that some criticize Polanyi's use of the embedded metaphor of the economy.

Lave sees the container metaphor as “a static residual surrounding” rather than an emergent process in which all knowledge can be seen as situated (just as those who criticize some of Polanyi's usage claim that the economy is always embedded in society). So, it is important to note that there are different kinds of containers: Lave critiques the static view, noting that Bruno Latour “point[s] out that when most people talk about context, they sketch in the air a shell about the size and shape of a pumpkin” (2019: 44). She continues, quoting McDermott as follows, “context refers to an empty slot, a container in which other things are placed. It is the ‘con’ that contains the ‘text,’ the bowl that contains the soup.” (McDermott in Lave, 2019: 44). Lave is suggesting that the container metaphor in this case allows for decontextualization of knowledge. As she describes the position that she is rejecting: “abstraction from and generalization across ‘contexts’ (qua soup bowls) are mechanisms that are supposed to produce decontextualized (general and thus valuable) knowledge…Movement toward powerful (abstract, general) knowledge is construed as movement away from engagement in the world, so distance ‘frees’ knowers from the particularities of time, place and ongoing activity…Further, it is assumed that what is learned is of a general nature and powerful because it is not embedded in the particularities of specific practices” (Lave, 2019: 44–45). So, the issue here is that the container metaphor has the potential to abstract and disembed when it is used as a mechanism for distancing from situated knowledge and practice. ¹⁸

Returning to Karl Polanyi's embeddedness/disembeddedness metaphor, Dale (2010: 33–35) traces this to the influence of Fernand Tonnies’ notion of community or gemeinschaft, which resonates, I would note, with Michael Polanyi's tying of tacit knowledge to craft and master-apprentice relations. In several key paragraphs, Karl Polanyi lays out the idea of embeddedness of economy in society and then uses it again a page later in his discussion of Tonnies. I quote: “Tonnies’ sympathies were for the intimacy of the community as against the impersonality of organized society. “Community” was idealized by him as a condition where the lives of men were embedded in a tissue of common experience…He imagined this community as a co-operative phase of human existence which would retain the advantages of technological progress and individual freedom while restoring the wholeness of life” (Polyani, 1957: 69–70). Here again, the embeddedness metaphor is tied to a notion of the whole, rather than fragmented, individual experience, as well as a vision of intimacy, once again suggesting the proximity of the relations key for tacit knowledge. This is the type of holism that Levine describes as offering progressive political possibilities, allowing for “centrality” and “inclusiveness” (2015: 39), and the “power to hold things together” (2015: 27), not just the imprisonment and oppressiveness stressed by post-modern attacks on “the whole.” ¹⁹

Beckert contrasts Polanyi's use of embeddedness with Granovetter, who is often credited with establishing (or re-establishing) the concept in economic sociology. ²⁰ While Granovetter's approach focuses on how markets are embedded in networks of social relations, it isolates these networks from larger social contexts; in this case, the soup bowl is too small, and as Lave suggests, he ends up substituting a part for a decontextualized whole. As Beckert notes, this allows analysts to incorporate embeddedness into a “rational choice framework” that does little to challenge standard neoliberal economics (Beckert, 2007: 9). Thus, some have suggested the concept of mixed embeddedness “a concept that is much closer to the original meaning of embeddedness as intended by Polanyi…encompassing the crucial interplay between the social, economic, and institutional contexts” (Kloosterman et al. (1999). Caglar and Glick Schiller, discussed above for their focus on the social form of networks, also use mixed embeddedness or multiple embeddedness in describing the multiscalar power that migrant businesspeople encounter, “to highlight the significance of varying urban opportunity structures in the trajectories of migrant businesses” (2020: 96–101).

One can also see that many of these terms used in describing the tacit and the embedded as forms resonate with terms that have long been commonplace in anthropology: from Geertz's keywords “thick description” and “local knowledge,” to the proximity that is a key aspect of fieldwork methodology, to context itself, which, while discussed and debated, ²¹ is arguably anthropology's signature analytical move. Anthropology has also built a tradition of research based on the recognition of the importance of personal knowledge—though certainly debated since the 1980s—and the intimacies developed between researcher and research community. I point this out not to reopen longstanding debates about subjectivity and objectivity in anthropological research, but rather to suggest why tacit knowledge and embeddedness as forms, and some of the synonyms for them that I have been exploring, might resonate with anthropological approaches.

A recent example that highlights this resonance is provided by Sarah Besky's book Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea. Besky's ethnography is preoccupied with the ways that mass market tea, a commodity that is particularly difficult to standardize, is evaluated by tea brokers, blenders, tasters, and scientists, and the role of knowledge in this process. In one chapter, Besky (2020: 152–176) details attempt to replace traditional outcry auctions with digital auctions as a way of creating “quality markets.” This is a good example of neoliberalization, because both the old and new auctions are situated within capitalist practices, but the new auctions highlight the contrast between neoliberal and more traditional capitalist markets in India. The new computerized auctions are supposed to work in the way of abstract free markets for price-discovery and mitigate the lack of transparency of the traditional auctions arising from the “secret knowledge” of tea brokers. They can thus be seen as part of the broader audit culture that I discuss above, since they are a clear example of the quantification of knowledge in order to make it “transparent,” hence explicit. Besky is clearly sympathetic to the tea brokers who have devoted their lives to giving “stories” to each particular lot of tea, since it is through their collective tacit knowledge, and the personal relations that they have developed, that tea lots with many diverse characteristics are turned into tasteful standardized blend. The reforms, driven by abstraction, but also claiming to provide fairer prices for tea, stress the impersonal and the individual self-interested actor, without the recognition that knowledge about tea and its quality[ies] was based on its “radical particularity and variability,” not on some standardized commodity that can be known abstractly, outside the auction transactions themselves (Besky, 2020: 168). The traditional auctions combine competition between brokers with a collective solidarity of participants who exhibit “a collective desire to find a price for each lot of tea,” as “organoleptic valuation” and “quality prices” “were the products of shared smells, tastes and memories” (Besky, 2020: 156), thus the very kind of things that one could apply Polanyi's dictum “we know more than we can say” to. The tea brokers “kn[ow] tea—and tea plantations—on intimate terms” (Besky, 2020: 168). The digital auction was supposed to reflect spontaneous, individual knowledge that was developed outside the auction, while the traditional system was based on the “application of [collective and recursive] embodied knowledge,” at least partly developed within the auction.

By contrast, those promoting the digital auctions noted that the outcry auction “‘is so personalized…But it needs to be impersonal. The computer is impartial’” (Besky, 2020: 162). Though using the terms that I have associated with tacit knowledge throughout this discussion, Besky only uses tacit itself in passing, in reference to the rules of etiquette of the brokers (Besky, 2020: 72). And while she doesn’t romanticize the outcry auctions, she clearly has considerable sympathy for their sense of loss (of tacit knowledge and embodied skill) that she describes throughout her book. Indeed, she cites Karl Polanyi in using the term embedded to emphasize again the relationship of knowledge to a wider context in discussing the architecture of the outcry auctions. She notes here that the knowledge and stories about particular lots of tea are partly reflected in auction catalogs, which serve “to keep the tea economy embedded in the fabric of contemporary Indian life” (Besky, 2020: 54).

So, embedded here again serves, like tacit, as a metaphor of containership, to distinguish between processes of familiarity and processes of abstraction. Once again, even though tacit is explicitly referenced in the Hayek sense of spontaneous actions leading to price discovery, a battery of similar concepts are employed by Besky to suggest ideas of a collective tacit knowledge, embodied in individuals as members of a community, and in the objects, traditions and processes that makeup the outcry auction, which makes for a more intimate understanding of tea that resists processes of neoliberalization in both of the senses defined above: that of marketization processes and that of “objective” assessment through quantification. In this example, we see that forms travel, and have affordances, but also are shaped by the particular contexts of their use.

Virtualism: The tacit and the embedded defined through their opposite?

I have been arguing that tacit and embedded fit together as tropes, or forms, in their broad use to suggest proximity, intimacy, and containership, the latter engaging with part-whole relationships that have long been a key aspect of anthropological analysis. ²² As terms, they oppose distance and abstraction, two aspects of neoliberal marketization and audit culture. One approach that parallels the view of neoliberalism I’m developing is that of James Carrier and Daniel Miller who substitute their own concept of what they call “Virtualism” for neoliberalism in describing the changes occurring over this period (Carrier and Miller, 1998; Carrier and West, 2009). While the term virtualism has not, as far as I can tell, caught on and become part of general anthropological terminology, I find it useful in that it makes perhaps the clearest connection between these two aspects of neoliberalism (marketization and audit culture), while providing an anthropological critique that applies to them both. While not written in a language of forms and tropes, Carrier and Miller's concept of virtualism traces a similar trajectory to my argument and thus is worth considering here.

Carrier sees virtualism as based on processes of abstraction. He defines abstraction by drawing on Polanyi's disembedding in which “In essence, economic activity becomes abstracted from social relations” (1998a: 2), or more broadly any process in which we observe the “remov[al] of something from the social and practical contexts in which it previously existed” (1998b: 25). He notes that Chicago School Neoliberal economist Gary Becker provides the prototype for the conceptual process of abstraction in noting that in his analysis “Becker's economic genius…is his abstraction of a rational, autonomous, utility-maximizing core from each person, and with this the abstraction of these individuals from the social worlds in which they live” (1998a: 11). What Carrier calls “practical abstraction” on the other hand includes all the mundane processes by which socially embedded production and exchange—from “cottage industries” to the intimacies—both friendly and acrimonious—of shop trade between known individuals, are replaced by impersonal processes of production and consumption (1998b). While his story has an evolutionary cast to it, he notes that it is not a unidirectional process, and that there is always resistance to abstraction, and “sociability is a weed that propagates on the most stony ground” (1998b: 43).

So far, we have the disembedding piece of their story, but how is virtualism more than the abstraction that we associate with capitalism and commodity fetishism? Miller sketches a model of virtualism in the concluding chapter of the volume, in which he argues that virtualism consists of the rise of academic economics ²³ and its vision of abstract, decontextualized human rational action to hegemonic status within society at a time that saw “the rise of economics as the primary authority within politics” (1998: 197). Virtualism, then, implies not simply an abstract, decontextualized vision, but the political power and authority to impose that vision onto a recalcitrant society, to force society to conform to the model. In a later collection on virtualism in environmental projects, Carrier and West suggest virtualism is like virtual reality goggles that define the world in a limited way. “The virtual reality becomes virtualism when people forget that the virtual reality is a creature of the partial analytical and theoretical perspectives and arguments that generate it, and instead take it for the principles that underlie the world that exists and then try to make the world conform to that virtual reality” (Carrier and West, 2007: 7). While many academic visions might be virtual realities, and anthropologists are certainly not innocent of abstraction, ²⁴ what singles out “virtualism” as a distinct historical phenomenon is this ability to insist that the world should at least make the attempt to conform to the abstract model due to the political power and ideational hegemony of economics during this period. ²⁵

Miller's theory of virtualism highlights audit culture as sharing the same features as those he describes for economics in pursuing abstraction and the power to impose its abstract model on recalcitrant reality. This is one of the few, in-depth anthropological discussions of this relationship (between audit culture and marketization). Thus “the failure of an institution that is audited almost invariably results in calls for more auditing, even when it is clear that the audit process and results made the organisation's problems worse. So, as with economics, auditing is a force that…has become the slave of its own abstract and self-confirming logic” (Miller, 1998: 202). In terms of knowledge, audit culture, as discussed above, stands at the opposite end from the tacit, it is the hypostatization of explicit, decontextualized, measurable knowledge, something that Miller notes in particular for teaching, which is transformed from a relationship to simply the transmission of knowledge—a model of teaching long-rejected by education scholars, as noted in my discussion of Lave, above. Miller notes in particular the implications of this audit model for anthropology, citing Marilyn Strathern to the point that anthropology is a discipline whose strength “lies in embedded knowledge and the study of context.” Virtualism shifts attention to “concern for transferable skills and the pressure to make intellectual work visible and measurable.” Or as James Scott argues in relation to audit and assessment culture, “The seductiveness of such measures is that they all turn measures of quality into measures of quantity, thereby allowing comparison across cases with an apparently single and impersonal metric. They are above all a vast and deceptive antipolitics machine designed to turn legitimate political questions into neutral, objective administrative exercises governed by experts” (Scott, 2012: 111).

James Scott suggests a process parallel to Carrier and Miller's definition of virtualism, though he doesn’t use that term, in noting that state power often can transform reality “so that it more closely resembled the administrative grid of its techniques.” The problem here is that Scott is not referring to Neoliberalism, but rather to a much longer history that he traces across several centuries, and which is perhaps more directly tied to bureaucratic, administrative culture. Indeed, in using the ancient Greek word metis as a key metonym for practical, local, or situated knowledge, he suggests that the contrast between the two ways of knowing has a long history and can be found in all societies (Scott, 1998: 311). In more recent times, Scott applies his approach both to capitalist enterprises such as commodifying forests as well as state administrative systems, but he is of course more well known for the latter, as reflected in the title of his book Seeing Like a State (1998). ²⁶ Whether a process of commodification or state administration, what is lost in the process of legibility and synoptic vision is all of the local knowledge contained, for example in a forest, or an area of land mapped in a cadastral survey, “Just as the commercial forester found it convenient to overlook minor forest products, so the cadastral official tended to ignore all but the major commercial use of a field (for example, wheat, hay). That the field might also be a significant source of bedding straw, gleaning, rabbits, frogs, mushrooms, etc., was not so much unknown as ignored…” (Scott, 1995: 217; emphasis mine). While he doesn’t use the word tacit, he is describing processes by which tacit knowledge of “commoning” or polycropping, is overlooked and potentially eliminated, though he does suggest that such knowledge may survive in the form of resistance to projects of legibility (Scott, 1995: 219). This is, of course, the starting point for many recent anthropological projects on recovering local, tacit, and indigenous knowledge.

What this emphasizes again for my argument is that in understanding neoliberalism (or virtualism) as a social form, there is not one trope or aesthetic style that can be said to define it. It is rather the combination of a number of tropes/forms—and the rejection of a different set—that can be said to characterize the neoliberal project. This is where looking at the relationship of the tacit with the embedded (and their opposites), I would argue, helps to get a handle on the neoliberal project not simply as simplification/bureaucratization, nor simply as marketization, but as both processes, and, on steroids. This allows for, I would argue, new insights.

Quantification and its resistances

In this section, I lay out in greater detail one more piece of the intersection of marketization and audit culture, that is, quantification, or “big data.” I then draw from my recent ethnographic work on the Greek crisis and that of others to suggest some of the ways that it seems to make the link between tacit and disembedded in ways suggestive of an alternative to the neoliberal project. Once again, I suggest thinking about forms, in this case, the form “quantification,” and what it affords when combined with some of the other neoliberal forms that I’ve been tracking: abstraction, disembedding, and decontextualization.

Quantification is one of the targets of a recent anthropological collection Life By Algorithms (Besteman & Gusterson, 2019). Gusterson's introduction sees algorithms as a piece with neoliberalism, but also as evolving from state “scientific management” and the growth of bureaucracy, as noted in the discussion of James Scott's work above. He quotes David Graeber to the effect that, “The algorithms and mathematical formulae by which the world comes to be assessed become, ultimately, not just measures of value, but the source of value itself’” (2019: 5). In other work on algorithms and automation, Lowrie (2018) notes that “…as they craft and maintain the datascape, the technicians of global information capitalism are busily and happily laying the groundwork for the outsourcing of many social, cultural, and economic processes to computing machines” (349–50). ²⁷ In other words, along with the hubris of audit culture, it is very easy to see how algorithms might get out of control. Once again, as forms with particular affordances, we can see how these resonate with the discussion above: they are abstract, distanced, codified (algorithms of course are all about coding), and decontextualized, with claims to “universality.” ²⁸ In work on ratings and measures, authors Esposito and Stark describe the reduction of “taste” to “sensory measures,” and the “flattening” qualities of notorious college rankings, concluding: “Quantification integrates information, but in so doing, reduces, simplifies, and decontextualizes knowledge” (2019: 6).

Of course, it needs to be stressed that quantification as a form may, in Levine's terms, have certain affordances, but there is nothing that confines numbers to these uses and implications. Nafus and Beckwith, for example, in their study of D-I-Y sensor systems for monitoring home energy consumption, show how the abstracting power of numbers can be countered, appropriated, and familiarized through certain “craft” practices of use. “Ethnomathematics research…shows clearly just how immediate and material people's experiences with numbers can be…Numbers are not always or inevitably the quantitative scalpel of abstract precision wielded from on high” (Nafus and Beckwith, 2016: 117). This is why, once again as I have been arguing for “the tacit and embedded,” so for its opposing tropes: we need to examine the entirety of forms in which any particular use of quantification, numbers or algorithms are enmeshed.

In my own research (see Sutton, 2016) I have taken an approach to neoliberalism in Greece that illustrates some of the contrasts that I have been arguing for in approaching neoliberalism as “forms.” Indeed, I have suggested that there is a clear connection made in Greek critical discourses on neoliberalism between the idea of abstract, disembedded numbers, and an embedded “sociability” (similar to that described by Caglar & Glick Schiller above) that opposes this abstraction. At the time of this writing in 2021, it has been more than two years since Greece successfully completed its obligation to the EU and the IMF by adopting and implementing a plan of strict austerity, market deregulation, and state asset privatization. In combination with cutting wages and pension benefits, these measures have contributed to the impoverishment of large segments of the Greek population. The Greek government is again able to borrow long-term loans from international markets with low-interest rates. ²⁹ The last 2 years have also been a time of continuously improving economic indicators. For most Greeks, however, life continues to be characterized by high unemployment, poverty wages, and high taxes. The country's economic recovery is evident only amongst the disembedded figures hawked by politicians in governing parties. ³⁰ Government and neoliberal economists interpret such positive markers as proof that international markets and investors trust the new, reformed Greece, and in its ability to continue to repay its debt obligations in the future. For some citizens, this is a land made safe for capital investment, but for most people, life has grown even more precarious. The neoliberal restructuring of Greek society has certainly been met with protest.

I focus in particular on some of the expressions of this protest, and the use of food as a counterpoint to the abstraction of neoliberal figures. Relevant here is the idea that positive economic development has been shown in abstract economic markers which fail to represent everyday life. Cultural practices among many Greeks who oppose neoliberalism (whatever their party-political affiliation) often highlight the symbolic opposition between food and money, and food and numbers. To many Greeks, food ideally signals abundance, much of Greek food culture in good times was about ensuring that there was more than enough food not just for each particular household, but for the many times, one might want to or be called upon to offer hospitality to guests. One would never want to be seen as calculating cost when it comes to food generosity, as the image of a generous person, one of the most aspired-to values held by many in Greek society, is one of disregard for personal gain or loss. Food is seen to be about a containing sociability, and money is about a distancing abstraction.

Of course, provisioning oneself or one's family with food certainly does involve using money. But, even after a decade of neoliberal restructuring, everyday provisioning in Greece still often involves transactions where disregard for exact measurements or counting is a key feature. “Socially-embedded shopping” on the island of Kalymnos (Sutton, 2014: 31 ff.) means that there are rarely fixed or set prices in regard to many food items, but rather price is calculated based on many social and moral considerations that go into each transaction, with merchants expected to round up weights and round down prices in a disregard for exactitude. Stressing exact measures or prices would be seen as the height of anti-social behavior on the part of merchants suggestive of treating people as a source of profit, rather than as a source of livelihood and dignity. By the same token, customers are expected to turn a blind eye if the merchants manipulate or even fail to issue receipts (though the central government has cracked down on these practices in recent times). These examples are meant to show the symbolic oppositions between food and money/calculation as it is negotiated in daily practice.

The embeddedness of food was often tacit as well. It drew on tacit knowledge of how to survive in difficult times, which had been built up over previous crisis moments. And it called on shared notions of proximity, what Herzfeld (1997) calls cultural intimacy, to challenge the explicit discourse of austerity and its characterological attack on Greeks as not conforming to European economic prescriptions. ³¹ One of the key forms of protest to neoliberal reforms was called yogurting (yiaourtoma), or throwing yoghurt at politicians and other authority figures. ³² My colleague Vournelis and I (2012) have argued that what people were expressing by throwing yogurt was that the neoliberal austerity package (or memorandum) was in fact a stance against Greekness. And that the people were covering their politicians in this substance that represented Greekness to remind them of their Greekness.

However, people didn’t explicitly say that this was the point of yogurting. It simply made sense to them, and–as in so much anthropological analysis—it was through the process of uncovering tacit knowledge that makes up the shared imagination of Greeks, the things that people know without saying, that we were able to interpret the act of yogurting. In this case, the tacit knowledge was that yoghurt is a symbol of Greekness and that neoliberal reforms were anti-social, thus an attack on many Greeks’ ability to achieve the “dignity” (aksioprepeia) that is necessary to emplace themselves in their lives. Here, once again, we see the different parts of neoliberalism coming together: the marketization, reduction to numbers, and the valuing of explicit, assessable, over tacit knowledge, that I have been describing throughout this paper. Many similar examples of this type of analysis of anti-neoliberal protest in Greece could be adduced (See Sutton, 2016; Vournelis, 2013). ³³

One more brief example (see Sutton 2021 for elaboration) of the premium placed by many Greeks on social relations over such a disembedded, economistic view of life is seen in the Social Kitchen movement. The Social Kitchen movement known as “the Other Human” is one of a number of solidarity initiatives that flourished during the crisis. It was founded in Athens by Kostas Polychronopoulos, but has spread throughout Greece, and provides meals once a week or sometime more often, on a model of people gathering together to cook and eat together in a public space. The impetus is one of shared humanity expressed through commensality. By eating together people form social bonds, bonds that can extend to other areas of social life, and indeed, the social kitchen often provides people with links to other hubs of the solidarity movement, including refugee support groups.

This suggests the kind of emplacement in multiscalar networks of power described by Caglar & Glick Schiller (2020). This is the kind of social action that rejects the virtualism of people as numbers or as categories as in my discussion of Carrier and Scott. But it is not just eating together that is at work here. Both the food and the act of cooking matter. The Other Human is not a potluck. They gather ingredients and cook together in public, with many hands pitching in to chop onions, open cans, mix and stir the ingredients, add spices, pass out the cooked food, and clean up afterward. The senses associated with cooking and all the embodied knowledge that accompanies this, are fully engaged. A large cooking pot and a larger spoon are ubiquitous at these events, and while the former may be symbolic, the latter seems to draw in multiple hands to share the task of stirring among those assembled, men and women, young and old, once again suggesting the proximate, embodied and situated.

Conclusion

Anthropology is filled with longstanding calls to give as much attention to form as to content. Comaroff and Comaroff note that in ritual studies there has been “a stubborn preoccupation with substance over form, with the content of rites rather than with their constitutive modes of practice…part of the general, post enlightenment Western tendency to divide reality from its representations…” (1993: xix). And Kelley (1998), in critiquing studies of African American urban culture, highlights the downplaying of aesthetics in social science approach to the meaning of cultural practices. Similar calls have come in the past 25 years from sensory studies and materiality/material culture studies (e.g. Howes, 2003; Boivin, 2010). Forms, aesthetics, tropes, these are the tools by which I suggest that we might say something new about neoliberalism, and in particular, the relationship of marketization (disembedding) to audit culture (abstraction), which I have tried to capture in the just-so-story of two brothers who might have had a mutual influence on each other's thoughts. ³⁴ So when Narotzky (2016) makes claims for “the hegemony of form” as a way of approaching neoliberalism, I am mostly sympathetic. Narotzky provides examples from the anti-austerity movement that suggest why certain deployments of the tacit, when taken to extreme, might lead to a movement that fails to make connections with larger structures of power that need to be targeted. But at the same time if tacit knowledge is its central pillar, how is it that neoliberalism also takes on the abstractions of audit culture? This is where networks and embeddedness help, I would suggest, to emphasize that tacit knowledge does not only “emerge,” or rather in doing so, it also can end up in larger containers, as Besky's work on tea auctions suggests. We need to give a greater sense of the “play of tropes” (Fernandez, 1986) that combines the affordances of different forms, and which can give us a better understanding of their possibilities as Levine argues, and the ways that different tropes or forms combine to create particular cultural possibilities.

In Greek popular culture the anti-social nature of neoliberalism is attributed often to “accountants’ reasoning” (“λογιστική λογική”); running society with a singular focus on the bottom line at the expense of satisfying social wants and needs, and the explicit at the expense of the tacit, which is expressed in the popular phrase “when the numbers prosper, the people suffer” (see Sutton & Vournelis n.d.). Explicit numbers are belied by tacit truths. Explicit calculation marks the diminishing of the human condition to an existence deprived of its complexity and diversity, which is why in Greece (and other places) neoliberal policies are experienced and describe as both anti-social and as personal indignities at the same time. ³⁵

Embeddedness, as a form of context, has long been a hallmark of sociocultural anthropology, as Marilyn Strathern showed in her juxtaposition of Frazer's “out of context” presentation of customs and that of Malinowski in which customs (ideas or behavior) were analyzed “in terms of the context to which they properly belonged” (Strathern, 1987: 260). ³⁶ Tacit knowledge, under different labels, is a foundational part of our fieldwork methods and our data. As Pool (2017) notes, in accounting for anthropological data, we always have more in our heads than what can be accounted for on paper in research reports and other “hard” forms of data collected and stored in the back of closets. Another way of saying, with Michael Polanyi, that we “know more than we can say.” So, if there is something new in my argument it is not that we need to incorporate either of these concepts into anthropological approaches where they clearly already exist. Rather it is that we should see tacit and embedded as forms that shape our thinking, in opposition to neoliberalism, and that as forms, as Levine argues, we think them together.