Janet Roitman is University Professor at The New School and Honorary Professor at RMIT. She is the author of Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa and Anti-Crisis.
‘This is a crisis’ is not a mere empirical observation that can be unproblematically represented in a semantic act. Instead, ‘This is a crisis’ is a logical observation—it is a claim. And it is, moreover, a conceptual claim.