Competition inherently affords counter-hegemonic ways of being---failure isn’t totalizing but instead is a generative experience that constantly subverts normative values. Turns the K---only through embracing competition can we mediate divergent rhythms and experiment with alternative socialities.

Beyond Neoliberalism In sum, competition has long been an animating concern of anthropological theory, albeit often a tacit dynamic that is not theorized explicitly. Recently, critical attention has focused on neoliberal social and economic policies that deploy competition as a mode of governance. In the process, however, conversations about competition have too often become conversations about neoliberalism, subsuming the former into the latter such that theory about neoliberalism encompasses theory about competition. Yet competition as a human experience and a way of relating is not exclusive to neoliberal contexts. Nor was competition as a mode of governance an innovation of neoliberal ideologues and economists. Rather, competition is also tied to the political/economic ideologies of Leninist and Stalinist Russia (Siegelbaum 1982; Viñas 2022), communist and neo-socialist China (Rao, this issue), and post-independence socialist India (Alter, this issue). To theorize competition itself, analysts must address its implication in political projects aligned with neoliberal ideals and those that differ dramatically. Instances of competition as a mode of governance (neoliberal or otherwise) share the assumption that competition produces predictable and predetermined social changes. Neoliberal ideologues expect that market competition leads to progressive technological and social change, and the just (if not even) distribution of wealth. Likewise, Siegelbaum (1982) shows that ‘shock work’ competitions (in which workers competed to be most productive) were envisaged to generate a sense of collective unity and transformations in dispositions toward work in twentieth-century Russia, albeit within a communist framing of ideal subjectivity. Buitron, Alter, McCarthy, Rao, and Long (all this issue) also show how competition is encouraged with the hope of precipitating anticipated changes. Social scientists have often shown that the assumptions held by neoliberal ideologues and economists about competition's outcomes are incorrect. Rather than fueling progressive social change, competition as a technique of neoliberal governance produces inequality, legitimizes violence, and shapes subjectivities in very predictable ways. The critique is thus that neoliberal economists are wrong, both about what competition's outcomes are and that its actual outcomes are generally deleterious. Both anthropological critique and invocations of competition as governance assume that competition leads to changes that can be defined in advance. Despite this, an emerging literature shows that highly individualized, calculating, and reflexive subjectivities are not an inevitable consequence of neoliberal governance. Rather, relational moralities and subjectivities also appear to be central to life in highly neoliberalized contexts (Colloredo-Mansfeld 2002; Cristian Rangel and Adam 2014; Trnka and Trundle 2017). Building on this work, we question the assumption that competition has predictable outcomes, and that those predictable outcomes (whatever they might be) define competition. To do so, we invite readers to think with us about the relationship between rules, participation, arbitration, and competition's outcomes. Here, we find inspiration in the anthropology of games. Rules, Restrictions, Stability, and Change The instances and dynamics of competition considered in this issue all entail rules, conventions, and shared parameters. These may be tacit or explicit, but they always involve a shared sense of what one is competing for, how one competes, and the ways that performance is likely to be evaluated. This is equally true of competition as a quality of a relationship and as a formalized framework for interaction, although rules and conventions may be more explicitly articulated in the latter than the former. Two contrasting approaches to games help illuminate the relationship between competition, rules, and social reproduction. Drawing on Johan Huizinga's (1949) understanding of games as distinct from ordinary life, David Graeber (2015: 109) suggests that bureaucracies—like games—create ordered spaces in which the relationship between action, meaning, consequence, and reward is clearly delineated. This is not to deny that there are rules and conventions outside bureaucracies or games; rather, tacit rules and conventions exist in all social interactions. Yet such tacit rules induce anxiety because their implicit nature means that there is always the possibility of getting them wrong.6 Graeber contrasts the rule-bound space of games with play, the “free expression of creative energies” unbounded by rules (ibid.: 192). Play, he suggests, creates rules (and thus games and order) but is, by definition, not constrained by the rules it creates. When one plays, one has the capacity to reimagine action, meaning, and the world in new and creative ways. At the same time, creative expressions (or actions that do not heed behavioral conventions) might just as easily be violent rather than affirmative or pleasurable. The unpredictability of play-as-freedom makes it unnerving. Games (and bureaucracy) thus offer a ‘utopia of rules’ (Graeber 2015)—a safe haven from the indeterminacy of free creativity. For Graeber, rules generate a sense that the world is ordered even if it is not. We might argue that people find convention-bound competitive spaces appealing because they claim to authoritatively determine relative value within given parameters—that is, to generate order. Neoliberal imaginaries of competition as the ‘invisible hand’ of the market make precisely this claim—that competition will authoritatively reveal relative value in a given moment. Read this way, it is the claim that competition can and will determine value that makes it appealing, even if this promise of predictability is rarely fulfilled. What competition does from this perspective is to act as ideology, in the Marxist sense, maintaining social structure in the face of evident contradictions. Graeber's approach, like Huizinga's (1949: 10–12), assumes that the rules of a game or competition are clearly delineated, understood in the same way, and equally applied by and to those involved. This generates a reassuring sense of order. Yet as this collection shows, the rules and conventions of competitive spaces are neither stably imagined nor applied. Rather, they are always under-determinate because the complexity of social life always exceeds abstract structural prescriptions. Thomas Malaby suggests an alternative way to imagine the relationship between competition, rules, and meaning. Inspired by practice theory (Ortner 1999), Malaby (2007: 104) considers games as constructs grounded in action and thus as “dynamic and recursive, largely reproducing their form through time,” but necessarily “always in the process of becoming” (ibid.: 103) as they are re-enacted, rather than deeming them beyond the ordinary (cf. Bateson 1972; Caillois 1962). As they are remade, reinterpreted, and reproduced, games are subject to the possibility of emergent change. However, indeterminacy (beyond the self-evident contingencies of practice) is central to games. Like Graeber, Malaby suggests that bureaucratic rules are designed to make life predictable, even if they often fail to do so. By contrast, games are contrived to deliberately produce a degree of indeterminacy, which can then be evaluated by players, audiences, and arbiters (Malaby 2007; 2009: 213–215). Such indeterminacy might be semiotic—dependent on the changing interpretation of outcomes; performative—contingent on the capacity of actors to perform under the rules of a game; social—contingent on whether others evaluate actions in the same way as ego; or stochastic—dependent on factors beyond the control of actors, like the weather (Malaby 2007: 107). Whereas Graeber suggests that rules create stability, Malaby stresses the contingency that they generate as they are put into practice. For him, games “are about contriving and calibrating multiple contingencies to produce a mix of predictable and unpredictable outcomes (which are then interpreted)” (ibid.: 105–106)—producing a degree of disorder. That these dynamics of predictability and contingency mirror the uncertainty of life makes games compelling (Malaby 2003, 2007). Games do not provide refuge from life's unpredictability but embrace it. Crucially, Malaby draws the diverse opinions of audiences and arbiters into his account of games’ contingencies. Such an approach creates space to theorize competition's outcomes as constituted through the shifting evaluations of actors positioned differently within a given instance of competition. Similarly, his account lends itself to thinking about the dialectic between predictability and indeterminacy in competitive encounters and practices, which we argue is central to what competition does. Although clearly at odds, both Graeber's and Malaby's accounts shape our approach to competition. Affordance and Mediation Resonating with Graeber's understanding of rules as calming, this collection explores how competition is imagined to be capable of authoritatively determining relative value, and how this imaginary is sought after, both as a mode of governance (by institutions promoting competition) and as a technology of self-making (by subjects engaging in competition). For instance, young Indonesians participating in national graphic design competitions have some faith in such competition's capacity to determine who is best (Long, this issue). Likewise, the Chinese government and its citizens trust to a degree that competitive educational systems determine which students are brightest (Rao, this issue). The concept of competition implies an authoritative judgment about the relative value of participants’ actions—whether based on ‘expert’ preference or announced through a structured engagement, such as a 100m race, or a combination of both—rather than a decision about relative value being entirely arbitrary. A claim to authoritatively reveal relative value, however contrived the circumstance, is central to what competition does. Following Malaby, the collection shows how competitive spaces are fraught with contingency because they involve diverse and simultaneous interpretations by audiences, arbiters, and competitors about what constitutes competing, what is worth competing for, and how to do so. This ambiguity creates lived dilemmas—when competitors and audiences balance contradictory expectations or undertake counterposed actions—and affords the reinterpretation and reappropriation of rules and conventions. These dilemmas and affordances initiate opportunities to navigate competitive orders in new ways and generate outcomes other than winning or losing. Such opportunities may be interpretive, shaped by alternative appreciations of value, and/or affective, reflecting experiences that diverge from a competition's desired effects. For instance, Delhi NGOs organize countless competitions in hopes of teaching children to act on discourses that link hygiene, health, and development, but remain constantly anxious that children are participating for the ‘wrong’ reasons. For their part, Delhi children taking part in these competitions do indeed creatively refigure what it means to win and the value they find in performing competition, in ways that frustrate the development aims of NGOs (McCarthy, this issue). Although often intended or understood to authoritatively determine value, generate order, or precipitate predefined change, competition inherently affords alternative possibilities for sociality. While “institutions and their projects” (Malaby 2020: 15) often shape the initial forms that competition takes, institutions—whether development NGOs (McCarthy, this issue), yoga schools (Alter, this issue), state actors (Buitron, Long, Rao, this issue), or religious organizations (Almudéver Chanzà, this issue)—are not the sole determinants of competitive forms and outcomes, as McCarthy's child competitors clearly demonstrate. Hence, the collection focuses on the interplay between institutional desires and the possibilities for alternative meaning and practice that competitive structures afford. Our understanding of what competition does chimes with Jack Halberstam's (2011: 7) attention to “failure, loss, and unbecoming” as generative experiences that develop counter-intuitive and counter-hegemonic ways of being. For Halberstam, failure is not a refusal to take part in a world obsessed with sorting ‘winners’ from ‘losers’ (i.e., one in which competition is imagined to be the ultimate organizing force); rather, failure allows for the emergence of new perspectives in the wake of being identified as a ‘loser’. For Halberstam, only by failing or losing can one reject normative values and reshape normative relations. Dwelling in failure's creative potentials thus offers an alternative to the eternal hopes of success that pervade contemporary capitalism and mask structural inequalities (cf. Hage 2003). Like Halberstam, we dwell on the unexpected outcomes of competition that defy and subvert normative visions of success. However, we do not find competition's affordances to be predicated on outcomes being identified as either success or failure, as Halberstam's (2011) ‘queer art of failure’ demands. Instead, alternative possibilities emerge because what it means to succeed, fail, participate, refuse, compete, or abstain is always contingent and never clear-cut. These alternative possibilities are not simplistically subversive. They can facilitate insubordination by subverting competition's intended effects (McCarthy, Rao, this issue), but also allow people to mediate change in ways that defy absolute moral assessment (Alter, Buitron, this issue). They may also bolster stable collective identities even when they appear to divide communities and foster individualism (Long, Almudéver Chanzà, this issue). Competition's affordances beyond simply winning and losing often sit alongside a continued faith among participants in competition's value-defining capability. Competition's effects emerge from the discordance between expectations and lived experiences of competition. For instance, Chinese students are deeply disillusioned with the promise of meritocracy in an ultra-competitive education system, but rather than rejecting competition, they become passionate about engaging in the ‘better competitions’ that computer games offer (Rao, this issue). Elsewhere, young Indonesians find that competition wins are often not accompanied by the promised rewards, creating a disjuncture between the present and what it could (or should) have been. Although often deeply disappointing, this disjuncture leads them to embrace, rather than reject, an individualistic, competitive attitude toward life (Long, this issue). Competition suggests the possibility of authoritatively determining value and instituting a predetermined social order. Yet in practice, competition generates relationships, spheres of value, objects of interest, and practices that exceed the prescribed and structured modes of relating that it involves. Hence, we theorize competition as inherently generating ambiguity and instability precisely because it involves the under-determinate application of rules and conventions (not despite these rules). Where competition is invoked as a technique of governance and subjectification (whether in capitalist or non-capitalist contexts), we contend that it is inherently unwieldy, always producing meanings and relations that exceed its prescriptions. Future anthropologies of competition should thus consider dynamics of order and disorder as central features of competition's effects in and on the world, rather than focusing solely on its ordering and stratifying effects. Competition's affordances are shaped by and located among the swirl of different appreciations and evaluations in any given instance of competition. Hence, they involve a mediation of social orders and values rather than the imposition of one order or another. The collection shows that competition allows people to place divergent frames of value into conversation, mediate between them, and experiment with new ways of combining and integrating divergent values, practices, and forms of relationship. Competition is thus a practice and process of mediating the divergent rhythms (Bear et al. 2015), socialities (Tsing 2005), and ‘porous social orders’ (Gershon 2019) of a globally connected world. Formulated this way, future anthropologies of competition are poised to address the relationship between structure and change, a dynamic that has long been at the heart of socio-cultural anthropological inquiry.