Introduction (Ethics OF SCALE: RELOCATING POLITICS AFTER LIBERATION‪)‬

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The essays in this volume are concerned with theorizing changing institutional and embodied forms of power in this post-liberation epoch. The end of apartheid in South Africa symbolized for many the final conquest over explicit oppression. As romanticized celebrations of successful liberation faded and promised hopes for change became mired in webs of inequality, the language of liberalization emerged as hegemonic in state and international circles, naturalized by global finance, development organizations, and marginal economic actors. South Africa's hosting of the FIFA World Cup in June-July 2010, perhaps, most starkly represents how privatizing forces have become embedded within the state form, aligning corporate profit with collective political institutions. Hosting the World Cup involved a mammoth effort in which the South African state was mandated by FIFA to invest huge amounts of capital and institute strict regulations in exchange for the right to put on the sporting event. For South Africa, this corporatized global sporting spectacle presented hopes for global recognition and investment. Its dynamics sum up the blending of service industry consumption and citizenship that characterizes the early 21st century. The valorization of individuated entrepreneurship blurs legal discourse, human rights, and movements for political change with profit, where personal gain stands in for collective well-being. State and corporate bodies work together in the increasingly banal project of neoliberalism. Cultural, political, and religious collectivities use the language of privatization and liberalization to stake claims on cultural signs and material resources. Crucially, there has been a shift in how people contest power: from processes that produce place towards the ways that entrepreneurial subjects deploy the languages of mobility and rights to reinvent circulatory mechanisms themselves. Ethnographers have struggled to address shifts in the scalar relation between lived, bodily experience and institutional and geographical circuits of power. Rapid yet uneven velocity in the movements of bodies, signs, and technologies creates uncertainty, complicating the social and political alignments that coalesce around an entrepreneurial aesthetic.