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Resistance/refusal: Politics of manoeuvre under diffuse regimes of governmentality
Abstract
How do contemporary subjects navigate, withstand and even contest the particular governmental assemblages that define regimes of power today? The article addresses this question by considering ‘refusal’, which has emerged as an increasingly potent empirico-theoretical anthropological concept by, in part, marking an explicit contrast with the longer-standing concept of ‘resistance’. Through analysis of resistance and refusal literatures, and with reference to fieldwork with Burmese grassroots activists and Rohingya civil society actors, the article delineates resistance and refusal as divergent but intertwined tools for engaging different aspects of any given apparatus of power. Where resistance describes opposition to direct domination (sovereign modes of power, following Foucault’s schema), refusal describes the disavowals, rejections and manoeuvrings with and away from diffuse and mediated forms of power (governmentality). To the extent that contemporary apparatuses of power typically constitute a hybrid assemblage of sovereign and governmental forces, subjects of population groups draw upon both resistance and refusal tactics in their navigations of these apparatuses, navigations that refigure the collective resisting/refusing subject. Resistance and refusal hence operate in a quasi-dialectical relation, meaning that through a play of recursivity between apparent converse strategies (direct confrontation versus evasion) groups come to fortify stronger positions from which they can persist. Resistance and refusal not only constitute the conditions of each other’s possibility, sharpening the particular interventions that each makes, but demonstrate the necessity of a politics of manoeuvre in which subjects—as individuals and part of collective groups—oscillate between direct confrontation and governmental navigation.
... The insurgent corridor countersovereignty entailed a distinct form of political refusal insofar as it avoided mimicking the state's biopolitical logics of monopolization and the extraction of corridor traffic and related livelihoods. 4 Political refusal has been defined as a distinct act that is based on the denial of sovereign subjugation by not taking actors who claim sovereign superiority as legitimate interlocutors and by rejecting any engagement with them, including negotiation and even contestation (McGranahan, 2016;Prasse-Freeman, 2022;Simpson, 2014). Although the PKK guerillas contested the Turkish state sovereignty to create the insurgent corridors, they also pursued an act of refusal by avoiding the biopolitical management of circulation and circulation-based livelihoods. ...
... In this way, the insurgent corridor countersovereignty adopted a distinct form of political refusal. Although political refusal has been understood as a distinct political act that rejects any engagement with the actors who claimed sovereign superiority (McGranahan, 2016;Prasse-Freeman, 2022;Simpson, 2014), the countersovereignty exercised in insurgent corridors constituted a political denial of nation-state sovereignty and related forms of biopolitical governance, including the exclusive authority to decide what counts as legitimate livelihoods and mobilities. ...
In Turkey's Kurdish borderlands, smugglers occasionally entered insurgent corridors, the guerrilla-controlled mountainous passages, to bypass state control. This article takes insurgent corridors to frame sovereignty as monopolization of space-making and proposes space-making as a key analytic to examine the forms of sovereignty that facilitate or undermine specific extractive practices. As a spatial form, corridors are central to the claiming and exercising sovereignty and extraction without having complete territorial control across a bounded space or the whole population in that space, the territoriality identified with nation-states. By controlling corridor space and monopolizing the traffic in them, colonial empires, nation-states, corporations, and rebel movements exercised sovereignty and extracted value that is carried or generated by corridor traffic. The insurgent corridors further complicate corridor sovereignty as the Kurdish guerillas monopolized corridor-making without monopolizing and extracting the corridor traffic under a post-nation-state political vision that favors grassroots democratized organization of mobilities and livelihoods rather than centralized exclusive authority and biopolitical governance on them. The insurgent corridors constituted what I call countersovereignty, a practice contesting not only the existing state sovereignty but also political models of nation-state sovereignty and territoriality. While anthropologists understand refusal as disengagement from actors claiming sovereign superiority, the insurgent corridor countersovereignty entailed a distinct form of political refusal that rejects mimicking state sovereignty and associated forms of biopolitical governance.
... The 2010s, however, saw the emergence of another register of protest. For several years, in fact, a field of study has grown up around refusal (see in particular Simpson 2014;McGranahan 2016;Prasse-Freeman 2022). If resistance is an act of direct opposition to, or a reaction against, a particular authority (Hollander and Einwohner 2004), refusal involves a disavowal, a rejection or, more definitely, the desire not to recognize a power or some of its regulatory measures. ...
This text questions the ‘theoretical hegemony’ that seems to characterize the concept of resistance when it comes to assessing a challenge to the social organization or its guardians. Refusal, which is presented here as a form of constructive defiance, in fact proves to be just as relevant for this purpose, particularly when it comes to understanding collective actions that are non-confrontational but express a critique of the order of things. This is what the ethnography of utopian collectives established in the French countryside tends to show. The women and men who compose them, individually driven by the desire to ‘no longer play the game’, slip collectively, on certain occasions, into the interstices of the social order, acting together in order to refuse certain of its social, political and economic norms. Their ways of doing things and the social relationships they then form can prefigure certain features of a ‘different future’.
https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/q5pb4
... Besides the pandemic of COVID-19, the threads running through my discussion are my positionality as a researcher and the wider field of power within which my fieldwork is embedded. Teasing out these issues enables me to reflect on a thorny question for politically engaged anthropologists: if, as Scheper Hughes (1995,148) argued, 'the work of anthropologists demands an explicit ethical orientation to "the other" ', does this always mean loud, visible and public denunciations of societal injustice, or -as argued by some (for example, Simpson, 2007;McGrahanan, 2016;Prasse-Freeman, 2022) -can such engagement demand that anthropologists remain silent? When and why, then, would silence be appropriate? ...
... While the term was first coined by Indigenous studies scholars (Simpson 2007(Simpson , 2014(Simpson , 2016(Simpson , 2017Coulthard 2014), many others have since contributed to its conceptualisation. This includes interventions from scholars within anti-Blackness studies (Campt 2017a(Campt , 2017b(Campt , 2019da Silva 2018;Shange 2019;Karera 2021;Nxumalo 2021); pedagogical and educational studies (Fine et al. 2013;Tuck & Yang 2014;Rodríguez 2019;Martino & Omercajic 2021;Raymond & Canham 2022); geography, environmental, and discard studies (Zahara 2016; Joly et al. 2018;Wright 2018); anthropology and cultural studies (Murphy 2017;Rowe & Tuck 2017;McGranahan 2018;Prasse-Freeman 2022); gender, women's, and sexuality studies (Cahill et al. 2019;Mengesha & Padmanabhan 2019); and migration, refugee, and border studies (Jones 2012;Wrightson 2020;Newhouse 2021;Coultas 2022;Mitchell-Eaton & Coddington 2022;Meier 2023). ...
This special issue explores the concept of refusal through academic and personal reflections, conversation, poetry, activism, and performative practice. In this introduction, we first situate practices of refusal within very specific locations of struggle and then frame these refusals as a practice of relating otherwise. Relating otherwise is a ‘mode of engagement’ – not a theory or method – that shapes relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world. The introduction goes on to discuss how refusal practices engage with (1) decolonial modes of knowing, (2) embodied, situated, and relational ways of meaning-making, and (3) the undoing of existing dichotomies within ‘activist’ practice.
... This initial 'refusal' of a neoliberal reconciliation approach, whereby complacency to violent structures of domination is not accounted for, allowed for the development of a process, and an aftermath, geared towards the sovereignty and self-determination of Wabanaki people. As Prasse-Freeman notes 17 when examining the work of the refusal writing collective (RWC, i.e. Audra Simpson, Carole McGranahan, Elisa Sobo and Erica Weiss writing for Cultural Anthropology in 2016) refusal is identified as an attempt 'to construct a plane of equivalence' on which, for example, Indigenous peoples living within the settler colonial state 'present themselves as equally sovereign as those states that envelop and oppress them'. ...
The Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission (MWTRC) is one of the more recent examples of the truth and reconciliation model being used in a settler colonial context. This article argues that the MWTRC highlighted a historical and continued refusal by Wabanaki people to ongoing systems of white settler violence especially in the form of Native child welfare. Examining the MWTRC through the lens of refusal allows for a critical analysis of the ways in which the MWTRC subverts neoliberal reconciliation models that leave colonial structures unchallenged and unchanged. The MWTRC, as a process founded and led by Wabanaki and settler social workers and Wabanaki survivors of the child welfare system, actively refused reconciliation with settler colonialism. Instead it sought a process predicated on a relationship that accepted the realities of historical and continued oppression of Wabanaki people and sought long-term transformative change for Wabanaki people. Relying on two years of conversations between the authors and the community of Wabanaki and settler individuals who initiated and partook in this process, this article offers an analysis of the MWTRC and how its strategy of refusal denied settler colonial co-option of a Wabanaki-centred process.
... Their performativity is characterised by the experimental nature of the artistic shaping of resistance (Derman 2017, 12). Third, the impact of these movements is assessed in terms of their identity-forming and solidarity value and their effect, based on scholarly literature on protest aesthetics (Korkut et al. 2019) and resistance (Laszczkowski 2019;Prasse-Freeman 2022). This paper is based on empirical data collected during field research in Melaka in the summers of 2018 and 2019 among members of the kristang community. ...
This article makes the case for environmental protest aesthetics as part of a decolonial worlding that encompasses a variety of relational performative acts through which creative resistance to colonialism, capitalism, and resource exploitation is staged. These acts are understood as relational because in their graphics, image-text events in social media, and in their appearances at street protests, they refer to a system that they seek to subvert. The case studies drawn on are Fridays for Future, Klima Action Malaysia and the kristang community in Melaka. Inspired by research on worlding, the aesthetics of protest and performative acts these case studies are examined as manifestations of different facets of decolonial worlding, with a particular focus on the production and dissemination of visual material in the context of environmental protest.
... One variety of resistance comprises everyday acts (de Certeau 1984;Ewick and Silbey 1998;Merry 1995;Scott 1985;compare Ortner 1995;Kerkvliet 2009;Prasse-Freeman 2020) that negate, criticize, or disengage with a social time. When 39. ...
The temporality of resistance is one of interregna. Resistance wins, loses, and draws, while old and new power relations continuously rise and fall, being entrenched and resurrected as they are contested and usurped. Just as power radiates from all over, from the state, law, other social institutions, and relationships, resistance is diffused across yet vested in individuals and groups, moving in solidarity through interconnected pasts, presents, and futures. “Interregna” thus resonates with contemporary theories about the multisited nature of power, but expands the scope of attention to temporal heterogeneity. It sees resistance as a great host crossing lands, seas, and times. Protests in this political moment are connected by their fury and determination to overcome injustice, as well as by histories and memories to struggles that came before. “Interregna” also keeps us alert to unknown wrongs that lie ahead, and the need to fight ceaselessly for progressive justice. Understanding resistance as interregna, we sharpen our appreciation for law and power, and the manner by which we study legal mobilization, legal consciousness, and social change.
This article analyzes the political activities of residents in a 50-year-old slum in New Delhi. Based on long-term fieldwork undertaken periodically between 2004 and 2019, we describe the forms of oppression experienced by slum residents, how they cope in their everyday lives and how they have responded to their oppression. In order to understand the nature of slum residents’ political activity, we also analyze forms of group consciousness and solidarity among residents. We identify three main channels through which slum residents act politically: by voting, by taking part in protests and demonstrations, and by using informal intermediaries. We show that they are fully aware of being oppressed and express dissatisfaction with the government and ‘the rich’. However, their political activities are quite limited and constrained by the structural context within which they act. Their primary goal is to be included on equal terms in the existing system, not to change that system. Hence, their strategies can be described as affirmative rather than transformative. The analysis brings out three main points: First, that without external assistance slum residents lack the organizational capacity for sustained political mobilization; second, therefore their main way to seek political influence is through local intermediaries; and third, that while their reliance on intermediaries enables them to access certain goods and services it also paradoxically reinforces their marginalization.
Oil palm plantations often produce figurations of heroism and villainy attributed to human and nonhuman actors. Yet these categories may mask the subtleties of local experiences. Indigenous Batek people in Malaysia highly value the autonomy of both plants and people, but with forests disappearing, many who turn to labor on plantations find themselves struggling for autonomy. At the same time, they do not extend autonomous personhood to the oil palms with which they labor. This article explores the degrees of personhood attributed to botanical persons and the entangled human and botanical autonomies thus produced. It demonstrates the ambivalences of multispecies relationships in plantation frontier contexts and argues that by attending more closely to Batek theories and enactments of autonomy, categories of heroism and villainy are destabilized. This might offer alternative modalities for grasping the ambivalent nature of life on the edges of a plantation.
S’appuyant sur l’ethnographie d’une expérience communaliste contemporaine, cet article vise à remettre en question le recours trop systématique à la notion de « résistance » dans l’étude de phénomènes de contestation et de critique sociales. L’expérience en question est une action collective utopique accueillant divers individus ayant préalablement fait le choix de bifurquer. Ni revendicative, ni confrontationnelle, elle n’en est pas moins travaillée par des logiques de conflictualisation d’où émerge une forme politique en soi : le refus. La spécificité de ce dernier est certainement d’offrir à celles et à ceux qui l’expriment d’envisager d’autres possibles au sein même de l’ordre social dominant. (https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04156402).
/////////////// Based on the ethnography of a contemporary communalist experience, this article aims to question the over-systematic use of the notion of « resistance » in the analysis of phenomena of social contestation and critique. The experience in question is an utopian collective action involving various individuals who have previously made the choice to change their lives. Neither confrontational nor demanding, it is nonetheless shaped by logics of conflictualisation from which emerges a political form in itself: refusal. The specificity of the latter is certainly to offer those who express it to envisage other possibilities within the dominant social order.
This article focuses on the concept of refusal, particularly as it has been developed within critical Black studies and critical Indigenous studies within anthropology and beyond. It argues that while both Foucauldian and Gramscian frames have generated often exquisite analyses of the animations and counter-animations of power, they have not, in a general sense, sufficiently attended to the foundational processes that charted the possibilities of modern personhood and political life not only in the West but globally. Nor did they tend to acknowledge the genealogies of Black and Indigenous radical thought that were informing approaches to political life within these communities, locally and transnationally. I contend that any significant reformulation of the discipline of anthropology must deliberate anew about the logics and mechanisms of political struggle in a way that recognizes and foregrounds—in nuanced and dynamic ways—the ongoing coloniality and racism that constitute the afterlives (and still lives) of conquest. Refusal provides inroads to this project.
Responding to bell hooks’ call to ‘Be Here Now’, I argue that paying close attention to the present enables us to render visible the ways in which we are implicated in systemic injustices. I explore how refusal is a promising frame through which to enact worlds that feminists want to live in, showing how everyday acts of refusal have the potential to bring alternative worlds into being. To make this argument, I identify four distinct modes of refusal that might serve to positively construct feminist futures in the now: 1) social and affiliative refusal, 2) embodied refusal, 3) slow refusal and 4) imaginative refusal. While these four forms are not an exhaustive account of the different forms of refusal, they are each powerful in the context of feminist futures, drawing on central concepts of feminist thought: care and relationships, situated knowledge and bodies, time as a feminist concern and the importance and value of wonder as central to feminist thought. I argue that in the context of patriarchal, capitalist and colonial systems, systems that serve the interests of few and dominate the majority, these modes of refusal serve to puncture the settled status quo, simultaneously offering a glimpse into feminist futures while enacting them in the present. I conclude by reiterating that feminist futures benefit from being closely attuned to our present, and that a politics of refusal might enable us to penetrate colonial, patriarchal and capitalist systems by reimagining and acting on alternative visions in the now.
Research has shown that women with insecure immigration statuses in the United Kingdom (UK) are more likely to register later in their pregnancy with National Health Service (NHS) maternity care providers. This late engagement with healthcare services is framed in academic debates as one of the key reasons for poor outcomes for these women and their children during and after birth. Interventions, therefore, have focused on how to remove barriers to accessing maternity care for these women. In this paper, we argue that this approach fails to account for the agency of the women adequately, which needs to be understood in the context of state harms and violence towards women with insecure immigration statuses and, in particular, their reproductive lives. We seek to shift these debates by framing this lack of early engagement with state-provided maternity services as a form of refusal that denotes an active disengagement by bordered women from intersecting structures of harm and oppression that are embedded in the UK’s National Health Service, particularly through the charging regime. We argue that the politics of refusal in this case are embedded in struggles not only for border but also reproductive justice. Drawing on participant observation and data from secondary sources, we illustrate how refusal of early antenatal care opens pathways for bordered women to seek the care-ful conditions they need and want during pregnancy.
Through digital ethnography of the mass uprising against Myanmar's early-2021 military coup, this article considers appeals to “the international community,” in which activists maneuver the simultaneous potential and peril of global entreaties, deploying a double-move of contradictory thrusts: to continue stoking the possibility of international intervention, activists reiterate demands while intensifying their affective content; conversely, they use anticipated failure of those appeals to “boomerang” them back to local publics—making the international a present-but-effaced addressee, they engage in the jouissance of abandonment, coordinate (potentially violent) tactics, shame their enemies, and engage in political debate on the objectives of their ongoing struggle. By retaining the key mediatory role vis-à-vis Myanmar publics, activists enact an alternative relationship with the international, one that invites intervention but is not dependent on it.
This article examines a form of activism in Myanmar that emerged after the 2021 coup: solidarity art, wherein art is sold overseas and the proceeds returned to the artists that produced it. Myanmar’s solidarity art demonstrates a new version of the phenomenon, where digital transmission replaces older modes of distribution, and the artwork is displayed publicly. While artwork of this nature may be useful, it requires interrogation because of the potential for imbalance between the producer and consumer – in this case between the Global South and the Global North. In this article, I review critiques of this art and its well-intentioned siblings, humanitarianism and advocacy. I then identify three elements of Myanmar’s transnational solidarity art that mitigate concerns about potential North/South imbalances – multiple transnationalisms, collective self-representation, and resource reciprocity. This newest form of solidary art, I conclude, can play a generative role in supporting transnational human rights activism.
Following the resurgence of anthropological interest in resistance studies, I show how resistance can be based on firm adherence to government policies, and can thus ideologically strengthen the state. Though it is common for anthropologists to conceptualize policies as political technologies of control, Chinese scholars have shown that policies can also be appropriated by citizens for purposes of resistance. These different views on policies imply a dichotomy between the state and society. However, drawing on ethnographic data on the resistance experiences of peasants and workers in a Chinese mining town (Pingan), I explore how Pingan people’s imagination of state policy implicates a “state-family” relationship in which “policy-based resistance” was bounded by a political-moral nexus. Pingan peasants and workers used state policies as a tool of resistance despite the policy restrictions placed on social life. They did not see state policies as offering opportunities of resistance but also saw them as resources for hoping the central state’s policies would bring them a happy family life. I illustrate this with three case studies in which Pingan people’s spatial imaginations of state policies connect to the notion of “family” (家). This article concludes by reflecting on the concept of “refusal,” arguing that those who employed policy-based resistance refused to acknowledge the local government as effective policy enforcer but accepted the central state as a benevolent policy-maker, offering them hope and allowing them to imagine a good society.
In encyclopedias, libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) are basically defined as collections with public access. Libraries collect published documents, archives consist of other kinds of documents or records, while museums are preoccupied with objects. However, the relations between LAMs are constantly changing. The aim of the introduction is to describe the purpose of the book; highlight some of the important relations between libraries, archives, and museums in a historical context; and illustrate how the Scandinavian LAMs are shaped by ideas and practices related to enlightenment, the nation state, modernity, and democracy. Finally, the introduction will present the main themes of the book: The historical perspective, the collections, and the common challenges.
Among the ethnic minority Lisu in the Nu River Valley on the China‐Myanmar border, Christian missionization and Chinese development have led to cultural loss by paradoxically erasing and reifying Lisu cultural practices. Responding to loss, non‐Christian Lisu men gather regularly to drink alcohol, a practice denigrated by state and Christian discourses. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that alcohol drinking is a form of melancholic play – a mode through which non‐Christian Lisu men objectify and refuse cultural loss. Revising conventional understandings of melancholia, in which people are said to be haunted by loss, I analyse how the men exert a haunting force through melancholic play. Incorporating forgotten rituals and summoning abandoned spirits, they reverse hegemonic hierarchies, reshape communal boundaries, and remember lost lifeworlds. By illuminating how melancholia constitutes an active refusal of loss rather than a pathological return of the repressed, this article contributes to understanding how people transform loss into social creativity, agency, and political action. Conjurer les esprits : jeu mélancolique et refus chez les hommes Lisu buveurs d'alcool à la frontière entre la Chine et le Myanmar Résumé À la frontière entre la Chine et le Myanmar, la mission chrétienne et le développement chinois ont entraîné une perte culturelle au sein des minorités ethniques Lisu de la vallée de la rivière Nu, en effaçant et en réifiant paradoxalement les pratiques culturelles Lisu. En réponse à cette perte, les hommes Lisu non chrétiens se réunissent régulièrement pour boire de l'alcool, une pratique dénigrée par les discours de l’État et des chrétiens. S'appuyant sur un travail de terrain ethnographique de longue durée, cet article soutient que la consommation d'alcool est une forme de jeu mélancolique – un moyen pour les hommes Lisu non chrétiens d'objectiver et de refuser la perte culturelle. L'autrice révise les interprétations conventionnelles de la mélancolie, selon lesquelles les gens sont hantés par la perte, et analyse la façon dont les hommes exercent une force obsédante à travers le jeu mélancolique. Ils renversent les hiérarchies hégémoniques, remodèlent les frontières communautaires et se souviennent de modes de vie perdus en incorporant des rituels oubliés et en invoquant des esprits abandonnés. Montrant comment la mélancolie constitue un refus actif de la perte plutôt que l'expression d'un refoulement pathologique, cet article contribue à comprendre comment la perte peut se muer en créativité sociale, en pouvoir et en action politique.
In this anthology, top scholars researching libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) issues in Scandinavia explore pressing issues for contemporary LAMs.
In recent decades, relations between libraries, archives, and museums have changed rapidly: collections have been digitized; books, documents, and objects have been mixed in new ways; and LAMs have picked up new tasks in response to external changes. Libraries now host makerspaces and literary workshops, archives fight climate change and support indigenous people, and museums are used as instruments for economic growth and urban planning. At first glance, the described changes may appear as a divergent development, where the LAMs are growing apart. However, this book demonstrates that the present transformation of LAMs is primarily a convergent development.
Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Transition will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners seeking to get on top of the LAM literature or the particularities of Scandinavian LAMs.
https://www.routledge.com/Libraries-Archives-and-Museums-in-Transition-Changes-Challenges-and/Rasmussen-Rydbeck-Larsen/p/book/9781032033648
Can stateless persons become legal‐economic subjects without state ratification? Can they appropriate technologies not designed for them to create both new subjectivities and new forms of community? A Malaysia‐based nonprofit social enterprise, composed of stateless Rohingya, has been attempting to circumvent state rejection by inscribing aspects of Rohingya (in)dividuals—biometric data, genealogy information, and records of community participation—on a digital blockchain ledger. The enterprise seeks to mobilize blockchain's affordances to iteratively construct Rohingya subjects, re‐presenting them to new institutions (banks rather than humanitarians) as quasi‐legal persons, producing entities ultimately certified for “financial inclusion”—bank accounts and loans—thereby hoping to generate post‐Westphalian spaces and subjectivities. Yet, amid a revanchist nationalist resurgence in Malaysia—as with bourgeoning right‐wing populism globally—the spaces in which blockchained subjects might maneuver have narrowed, compelling our attention to the “nonsovereignty” in this project's version of “self‐sovereignty.” [blockchain, biometrics, science and technology studies, (non)sovereignty, statelessness, Malaysia, Rohingya]
What do rights mean in Southeast Asia? How do differently situated individuals, social groups, and institutions, make sense of and deploy concepts of rights? How do their concepts relate to religious beliefs, norms, and practices that underpin social hierarchy and relations, as well as experiences with and memories of political conflict and post-colonial developments? What are the consequences of asserting rights? This Element takes a 'politics of rights' approach. The approach treats rights not merely as substantive or normative meanings found in international law, regional instruments and domestic constitutional documents, but as political processes: Rights come to life through ongoing series of social interactions. The approach in this Element helps readers understand the often contradictory findings about rights in a manner sensible to political subjectivities and helps readers make sense of why rights are sometimes helpful to Southeast Asians who appeal to them, sometimes disappointing, and often paradoxically both.
Nas duas últimas duas décadas tem-se assistido no Brasil um aumento significativo de planejamentos, políticas públicas e investimentos estrangeiros em infraestrutura, sobretudo, ligado a multiplicação de complexos portuários, notadamente para e na Amazônia. A “região” do Baixo Tocantins (Amazônia Paraense) constitui fonte de atenção e ações, mobilizadas pelos setores públicos e privados na produção de complexos portuários. O objetivo deste artigo consiste em analisar e mapear a territorialização portuária na Amazônia e suas implicações nos “territórios tradicionais” no Baixo Tocantins, Abaetetuba, Pará. Assim esquadrinhando e analisando: i) o quantitativo de portos, sua a expansão em termos espaço-temporal e os portos planejados; ii) os agentes hegemônicos (e setor econômico inserido) ligados a expansão de portos privados na Amazônia; iii) os efeitos múltiplos nas transformações do espaço agrário, particularmente as ações políticas (estratégias) e organizações empreendidas pelos agentes de resistência no Baixo Tocantins (Abaetetuba) como forma de “barrar” territorializações hegemônicas sobre “territórios tradicionais”. Face a isso o percurso metodológico baseou-se em levantamento bibliográfico e documental e pesquisa participante, realizada entre 2017 e 2021; e, tendo como fio condutor o diálogo com o campo de estudos da Geografia Crítica e da Ecologia Política.
This article examines the future as a technique of government aimed at controlling young people’s relationships to the present. It analyses the futures deemed feasible in a school located in a border area affected by the Colombian armed conflict. Based on ethnographic data collected primarily between 2013 and 2014, this study highlights the future’s regulatory nature and the types of commitments it seeks to generate in students. By examining the ideas and practices that align students’ horizons with state needs, this research reveals the tensions between an institutionalised future packaged as a rural entrepreneurship project and students’ aspirations for geographical and social mobility.
Amid Myanmar's fraught democratic transition, some local Pentecostals took up new opportunities to publicly evangelize to Buddhists, efforts that were met mostly with indifference. This article explores the role of indifference in mediating encounters across difference. Drawing together scholarship on recognition and sincerity, it argues that these evangelists were occupied not just with the challenges of hailing an audience in a tentatively more open public sphere, albeit one shot through with heightened tension around religious belonging; they were also concerned with what I call the performance of publicity: the ways in which publicity is itself publicized, celebrated, circulated, and received – especially online. Circuler dans la différence : performances de la publicité sur et au‐delà d'un train de Yangon Résumé Dans le contexte de la transition démocratique difficile en Birmanie, des pentecôtistes locaux ont saisi de nouvelles opportunités d’évangéliser publiquement les bouddhistes, mais leurs efforts ont été accueillis dans l'indifférence générale. Cet article explore le rôle de l'indifférence dans la médiation de la différence au cours de rencontres. En s'appuyant sur des travaux menés sur la reconnaissance et la sincérité, l'auteur soutient que ces évangélistes n'étaient pas seulement occupés par le défi de saluer un public dans une sphère publique temporairement plus ouverte, bien que traversée par une tension accrue autour de l'appartenance religieuse. Ils étaient également concernés par ce que l'auteur appelle la performance de la publicité : les manières dont la publicité est elle‐même rendue publique, célébrée, diffusée et reçue, notamment en ligne.
Purpose
The paper ethnographically explores modes of urban resistance emerging in tandem with climate change mitigation programs in Copenhagen.
Design/methodology/approach
Building on 11 months of fieldwork with a Danish construction enterprise, the paper examines the politics of urban climate change mitigation programs through the lens of a group of builders' struggles to rethink and resolve dilemmas related to environmental concerns in construction and urban development.
Findings
Based on an analysis of a specific construction project connected to a larger urban climate change mitigation program in Copenhagen, the paper shows how the builders deliberately move between different perspectives and positions as they navigate the shifting power relations of urban planning. The paper argues that this form of crafty resistance enables the builders to maneuver the political landscape of urban planning as they seek to appropriate the role of “urban planners” themselves.
Originality/value
Taking up recent discussions of “resistance” in anthropology and cognate disciplines (e.g. Theodossopoulos, 2014; Bhungalia, 2020; Prasse-Freeman, 2020), the paper contributes an ethnographic analysis of struggles between diverging and, at times, competing modes of engagement in urban climate change mitigation programs and thus sheds light on how professional actors negotiate the ambiguity of “sustainability” in urban planning.
While Myanmar's recent military coup has devastated many people in the country, particularly those from the Bamar majority, who had been enjoying a decade of quasi‐democracy, it has also produced a massive uprising against the military's seizure of power that appears to constitute a revolution. This is because amidst protests, general strikes, and guerrilla warfare, this majority has also been grappling with the failures of the last 10 years: through conversations facilitated by social media platforms, some are not only demanding changes to their democratic leadership's authoritarian chauvinism but are acknowledging the structural inequalities and exclusions built into Myanmar society.
Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but what seems to be missing are analyses capable of bringing the disparate techniques experienced in academic audit together into coherent technologies , and identifying how these technologies thereby constitute a distinct audit regime within the broader audit culture. While the anthropological literature implicitly calls for further historical and conceptual exploration of the rationality to these techniques , what is required is the translation of our understanding of audit rationality into a presentation of the concrete techniques of control as they are experienced, so that more effective counter-conducts and resistances can be conceived. This article indicates how an excursion into the Soviet Gulag, and the political technology of the 'camp' that is its principal apparatus, can reveal not merely how the techniques of audit operate, but also indicate how those techniques might be engaged tactically in the academic setting. This kind of analogic analysis can allow us to understand audit in ways more promising for resistance to its idiomatic power, replacing demoralized and helpless resignation with inspirational exempla. Politically, the article argues that 'techniques of the self' are not only necessary to engage audit techniques through particular kinds of counter-conduct, but how these counter-conducts are contributory to the organized and concerted kind of resistance that we so desperately desire. The practice of 'tukhta' is singled out and introduced as an illustrative means for combining survival strategies with the development of critical rationality in praxis.
The United Wa State Army (UWSA), an insurgent polity in the highlands of the Myanmar‐China border, has kept the Myanmar state at bay for 30 years. It runs its own administration and controls its territorial boundaries, but disavows secession and independence. It parades its army and walks out of national peace talks, but pledges to defend Myanmar's sovereignty and flies the Myanmar flag. This tactical dissonance consists of oscillating political relations, in which the UWSA intermittently makes and breaks ties with the outside. It is an incongruity both mimicking and disavowing various state effects in an improvisational attempt to adopt political registers and logics that allow it to avoid state domination and express the autonomy it seeks. This relational autonomy paradoxically fosters accommodation and stability, calling into question our assumptions about rebellion, disorder, and peace amid insurgency. [autonomy, insurgency, de facto states, United Wa State Army, Wa Region, Myanmar] 本文主要通过佤邦联合军的案例来研究在模仿国家政权的同时又拒绝它的现象。佤邦联合军是一支在缅中边境高地地区上独立于缅甸国家政府长达30年武装力量。 佤邦联合军有自己的整体管理体系且有自己的领土, 但他们并不主张与缅甸分裂从而建立独立政权。该武装力量组织阅兵仪式并推出和平谈判。与此同时, 他们却又高举缅甸国旗并起誓拥护缅甸国家的主权。 这种看似“失调“的策略侧重于频繁的变化佤邦联合军与外界的政治关系, 并且根据不同情况与外界断断续续地保持或中断联系。运用这种看似不协调的策略需要以一种随机应变的方式来时而模仿时而否认各种国家治理的效应。这种根据不同的情况来具体选择政治言论和逻辑使佤邦联合军一方面来避免缅甸政府的统治, 另一方面来表达他们自治的诉求。这种关联性的自治主权反倒促进协调和稳定。该现象能为我们对关于叛乱以及和平的已知观点和假设进行更深一步的反思和探索。[自治, 内战, de facto states, 佤邦联合军, 佤邦, 缅甸]
Much contemporary research on precarious mobility starts from the perspective that people moving across borders will seek out opportunities for legal protection, if these are available to them. However, this is not always the case, as some migrants who would qualify for asylum or refugee status choose not to seek legal recognition of their status. This paper is an ethnographic exploration of people who refuse to seek asylum. I examine how such refusals are narrated and made sense of from the vantage point of Juba, South Sudan. Taking seriously these refusals as agentive decisions, the paper explores how men who have the informational and material resources to chart paths that bypass juridical protection narrate refusal through their own grammars of masculinity. Thinking with refusal is generative in two important ways. First, refusal refocuses attention away from the specificities of particular power geometries and towards the underlying juridical orders and assumptions on which these geometries rely. Second, refusal offers a window into the social constellation and relations in which such migrants actively invest. Building on work that explores the intersection between masculinity and mobility, I show how gendered ideologies shape not just the decision to embark on a new migration project, but also inform how migrants evaluate the legal status-destination dyad as they plot their futures.
Recuerdo que cuando estabas en México, Monique, se discutía sobre las consecuencias de un giro aparentemente radical en la política nacional, una supuesta transformación profunda del ‘estado’. Tu trabajo, a la luz de esas discusiones, es todo un reto al pensamiento, uno de enorme valor heurístico. Permíteme explicarme.
Introduction to Living with Myanmar, an overview of Myanmar's recent development and the impact of government policy across a variety of fields.
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with No TAV activists in Valsusa, in Alpine Italy, protesting against the planned construction of a new high-speed railway. Focusing on activists’ experiences of vulnerability and police violence, the article contributes to the recent ‘subjective turn’ in the anthropology of resistance and contentious social movements, and responds to calls to ‘de-pathologize’ and ‘de-exoticize’ resistance. It explores ways to reconceptualize the subjective experience of resistance through a focus on affect, vulnerability and becoming. Combining neo-Spinozist theory of affects with Judith Butler’s feminist perspective on agency and subjectivity, the article seeks to point a way beyond the limitations of established approaches informed by the work of Michel Foucault. Further, the article also shows how affects experienced during direct action are embedded in activists’ longer biographical narratives and gradually structured, through remembering and narrativization, to provide ground for a coherent subjective sense of agency. Third, the article highlights the difference a focus on affect makes compared to the more conventional sociological focus on emotion. The notion of affect helps us to move beyond a rationalist and instrumentalist approach to emotion in social movements. The article stresses the heuristic potential of a focus on affect, but also considers methodological challenges posed by such a perspective. It suggests that the methodological toolkit available to the ethnographers of contentious politics can be enhanced by drawing on the affective capacities of researchers’ own bodies in order to register the visceral intensities vital to the experience of resistance and the ongoing formation of insubordinate subjects.
This article reflects on the possibilities for political action emerging out of quotidian engagements. Following controversies on the patenting of seeds in Canada and globally within the Committee for Food Security I explore what gave the impulse for political resistance in these different arenas. How did collective action emerge and how did it sustain itself? Three political concepts are important for understanding the political actions that I observed: Eigen-Sinn, empathy and strategy. These allowed me to follow and theorize political engagements. I first reflect on the potential to resist as a capacity of all human beings, because they have Eigen-Sinn: the capacity to attribute their own meanings to things, and act in their own self-interested way according to the meaning given. Self-interested action can only become political, however, when humans go beyond their strictly individual interests and empathize with others (humans and nonhumans), what Adorno described as getting into ‘live contact with the warmth of things’. Finally, I discuss how collective action can become not only possible, but also effective, by building and defending a space for strategic action.
Hydraulic City explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. The book demonstrates how Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructure built on the relations between residents, plumbers, politicians, engineers, and the 3,000 miles of pipe that bind them. In addition to distributing water, the public water network often reinforces social identities and the exclusion of marginalized groups, as only those actively recognized by city agencies receive legitimate water services. This form of recognition—what Anand calls "hydraulic citizenship"—is incremental, intermittent, and reversible. It provides residents an important access point through which they can make demands on the state for other public services such as sanitation and education. Tying the ways Mumbai's poorer residents are seen by the state to their historic, political, and material relations with water pipes, the book highlights the critical role infrastructures play in consolidating civic and social belonging in the city.
Is it possible to be both a refugee and a citizen? For six decades, Tibetan refugees have refused citizenship in South Asia as part of their claims to Tibetan state sovereignty. They have lived in India and Nepal as refugee noncitizens, either undocumented or underdocumented, for multiple generations. But as Tibetans migrate to the United States and Canada, they gain citizenship through political asylum while maintaining their belonging to the Dalai Lama's refugee community. This shift in political practice is as situated in specific histories as it is in geographies. Tibetan citizenship practices in exile are not claims for recognition or forms of resistance; they are, rather, a refusal of international norms through a present‐day insistence on past and future political sovereignty.
Drawing on international literature examining mismatch between racial appearance and racial identity, this paper analyses the subgroup of Indigenous Australians who have been identified, and self-identify, as ‘light-’, ‘fair-’, ‘pale-’ or ‘white-skinned’. We utilise the term ‘race discordance’ to describe the experience of regularly being attributed an identity that is different from how one personally identifies. In contrast to existing terms such as elective race, ethnic fraud and transracialism, race discordance does not seek to explain or judge the validity of identity claims that do not match perceived appearance. When unnoticed or unchallenged, ‘race discordance’ corresponds to ‘passing’. We propose the term ‘race refusal’ to describe instances when a person rejects the race they are ascribed to. In the case of white-skinned Indigenous Australians who are frequently assumed to identify as white, race refusal entails the refusal of whiteness. When light-skinned Indigenous people refuse whiteness, what are they refusing? In conversation with Audra Simpson’s notion of refusal of state recognition as an assertion of continued Indigenous sovereignty, we find that these particular micro-politics of race refusal demand rather than negate state recognition. We argue that identity refusal by pale-skinned Aboriginal people acts to disrupt histories of assimilation, white sociality and everyday racialisation while simultaneously reinforcing Australian recognition regimes.
Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition is an interdisciplinary of work of critically engaged political theory that traverses the fields of political science and Indigenous studies. The arguments developed in the book draw critically from both Western and Indigenous traditions of political thought and action to intervene into contemporary debates about settler-colonization and Indigenous self-discrimination in Canada. The book challenges the now commonplace assumption that the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state can be “reconciled” via such a politics of recognition. It also explores glimpses of an alternative Indigenous politics. Drawing critically from Indigenous and non-Indigenous intellectual and activist traditions, the book explores a resurgent Indigenous politics that is less orientated around attaining an affirmative form of recognition and institutional accommodation by the colonial state and society, and more about critically revaluing, reconstructing and redeploying Indigenous cultural practices in ways that seek to prefigure radical alternative to the social relationships that continue to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority.
The United Wa State Army (UWSA), an insurgent polity in the highlands of the Myanmar‐China border, has kept the Myanmar state at bay for 30 years. It runs its own administration and controls its territorial boundaries, but disavows secession and independence. It parades its army and walks out of national peace talks, but pledges to defend Myanmar's sovereignty and flies the Myanmar flag. This tactical dissonance consists of oscillating political relations, in which the UWSA intermittently makes and breaks ties with the outside. It is an incongruity both mimicking and disavowing various state effects in an improvisational attempt to adopt political registers and logics that allow it to avoid state domination and express the autonomy it seeks. This relational autonomy paradoxically fosters accommodation and stability, calling into question our assumptions about rebellion, disorder, and peace amid insurgency. [autonomy, insurgency, de facto states, United Wa State Army, Wa Region, Myanmar] 本文主要通过佤邦联合军的案例来研究在模仿国家政权的同时又拒绝它的现象。佤邦联合军是一支在缅中边境高地地区上独立于缅甸国家政府长达30年武装力量。 佤邦联合军有自己的整体管理体系且有自己的领土, 但他们并不主张与缅甸分裂从而建立独立政权。该武装力量组织阅兵仪式并推出和平谈判。与此同时, 他们却又高举缅甸国旗并起誓拥护缅甸国家的主权。 这种看似“失调“的策略侧重于频繁的变化佤邦联合军与外界的政治关系, 并且根据不同情况与外界断断续续地保持或中断联系。运用这种看似不协调的策略需要以一种随机应变的方式来时而模仿时而否认各种国家治理的效应。这种根据不同的情况来具体选择政治言论和逻辑使佤邦联合军一方面来避免缅甸政府的统治, 另一方面来表达他们自治的诉求。这种关联性的自治主权反倒促进协调和稳定。该现象能为我们对关于叛乱以及和平的已知观点和假设进行更深一步的反思和探索。[自治, 内战, de facto states, 佤邦联合军, 佤邦, 缅甸]
How do everyday acts of policing hinge upon the contrastive evaluation of sensible intensities? This article examines how various attunements toward regimes of sensible intensities shape the policing of borders and bodies in a place where questions of the “sovereign” and identifications of the “illegal” are semiotically and politically up for grabs: the Indonesia-Malaysia borderlands. In two expository sketches, it examines the various ways in which the Indonesia-Malaysia border is policed as a virtual threshold between people and places considered to be “more-or-less the same.”
Within anthropology, assemblage theory has achieved broad disciplinary traction, yet the theory’s philosophical premises are rarely explored. This article therefore revisits the Deleuzian notion of difference that underpins assemblage theory as a step towards rendering the theory more consonant with a relational anthropology. In place of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conception of discrete elements related only externally to each other within an assemblage, I propose a dialectical conception, whereby assemblage is taken to be a heterogeneous ensemble whose constituent elements also relate to each other internally. To arrive at this understanding, I examine the dialectical logic of Theodore Adorno. I then consider the implications of a dialectical notion of assemblage for recent work on the anthropology of capitalism.
This article examines the political and productive work of humor under conditions of precarity, war, and occupation. Drawing on the case of Palestine but making links to other contexts of violence and war, it explores the transgressive power of humor to destabilize existing power relations and established hierarchies by calling into question the norms and “rationalities” that underpin our social world. Palestine’s laughter in particular, it contends, constitutes a mode and practice of refusal to normalize conditions of subjugation. Accordingly, this article explores how humor, as wielded on the part of subjugated populations, constitutes a different kind of political grammar that cannot be adequately captured by the language of resistance. To laugh in the face of power is not to say: “I oppose you”—rather it is to assert: “your power has no authority over me.” It is to refuse that power authorizing force. As such, this article maintains that closer inspection of the relationship between humor, laughter, and power carves out new space for a working theory of the political, one wherein power is not opposed but disavowed. This disavowal, I argue, is also productive: it is to assert that other political orders and possibilities exist.
What does politics mean in contemporary anthropology? Counter to propositions that argue that neoliberalism has produced a “post-political” condition, we argue the notion of a post-political world was never empirically accurate. Instead, using the ethnographic method, our contributors show ongoing and diverse forms of political practices and contestations in the contemporary moment. We reconsider politics at a conceptual level, defining politics as practices of world-making that proceed through the formulation of constellations of critique, disagreement, difference, and conflict. We build this definition through a discussion of contemporary theories of the post-political and agonistic politics, and by tracing a history of political anthropology. Finally, we consider politics as both a practice and a goal. The authors in this collection show that new political anthropologies are particularly attuned to questions of commoning/uncommoning, spaces of articulation and disarticulation, and struggles to live “otherwise.” We argue that a return to these questions with a robust and specific engagement with politics is necessary for anthropology and increasingly urgent given the global conjuncture.
This article analyzes the remarkable wave of metropolitan rebellions that inaugurated the 21st century around the world (2000–2016). It argues that they fuel an emergent politics of city-making in which residents consider the city as a collective social and material product that they produce; in effect, a commons. It investigates this politics at the intersection of processes of city-making, city-occupying, and rights-claiming that generate movements for insurgent urban citizenships. It develops a critique of the so-called post-political in anthropological theory, analyzes recent urban uprisings in Brazil and Turkey, distinguishes between protest and insurgent movements, evaluates digital communication technologies as a new means to common the city, and suggests what urban citizenship brings to politics that the national does not.
Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations. By exploring the complex world constituted through humanitarianism, and how that world is experienced by the many people who inhabit it, Feldman asks pressing questions about what it means for a temporary status to become chronic. How do people in these conditions assert the value of their lives? What does the Palestinian situation tell us about the world? Life Lived in Relief is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of humanitarianism today.
This article examines the trajectory of struggles over land and resources in Dawei, a town in southern Myanmar. The site of a major special economic zone project, Dawei has seen sustained mobilisation around displacement, dispossession and environmental degradation, against the backdrop of national political and economic reforms. Recently, scholars have argued that earlier visions of postcolonial transition have lost their empirical and political purchase, as farmers dispossessed of land increasingly become excluded from formal capitalist production. What happens to politics and political form if dynamics of exclusion, rather than transition, organise political activity under today's conditions of accumulation? Repurposing Kalyan Sanyal's concept of postcolonial capitalism, this article describes and theorises the politics of dispossession in Dawei. Tracing the political activities of activist groups and villagers, it argues that two contrasting political trajectories - one secular-egalitarian, one situational-differential - constitute a heterogeneous political field, reflecting the complexity of postcolonial capitalism itself.
Our current ecumene is governmentalistically plural. The biopolitical technology of the regulation of one or another bounded population remains active among many other such technologies. The mode of veridiction proper to biopolitics is actuarial; it has a proper epistemology. In these two respects, it stands beside and apart from the mode of veridiction proper to a parabiopolitics, which is scenaristic and grounded in a sophiology. I extract the lineaments of parabiopolitical reason from two sources. One is an exercise undertaken in Greece between 2002 and 2004 under the mandate of the European program of FORESIGHT. The other is the work of Pierre Wack, whose methodology of scenario planning brings the difference that makes a difference between biopolitical epistemology and parabiopolitical sophiology most brightly to light.
Focuses on the concept of a public. Description of a public as a space of discourse; Element of impersonality in public address; Social role of a public.
Even as Indigenous authority over land remains under attack through ongoing settler-colonial processes, Native nations continue to pursue their own agendas. Like the negotiations around sovereignty across the globe, the result is a web of interconnected authorities. Native nations, US counties and states, the federal government, and various corporations constantly deploy creative tactics, calculated disruptions, and negotiated compromises in an effort to gain and maintain authority over a territory. As demonstrated by Osage political history, tobacco sales tax negotiations, and battles over industrial wind parks, acting as a sovereign creates interconnection with other governments. Considered in light of these ongoing negotiations, sovereignty is not freedom from external control but is, rather, an inescapable web of negotiation, contention, and concession that leads to further entanglement. [settler colonialism, sovereignty, corporations, compacting, energy production, Native nations, Oklahoma]
This article takes the notion of ‘refusal’ to be an alternative to recognition politics in settler colonial society. This is argued as alternative with recourse to ethnographic examples that highlight the way in which ‘consent’ operates as a technique of recognition and simultaneous dispossession in historical cases from Indigenous North America and Australia. Attention is paid to the ways in which Indigenous life in these cases refused, did not consent to, and still refuses to be folded into a larger encompassing colonising and settler colonial narratives of acceptance, and in this, a governmental fait accompli. It is those narratives that inform the apprehension and at times, the ethnography and governance of Indigenous life and are pushed back upon in order to document, reread, theorise and enact ways out of the notion of a fixed past and settled present.
The idea of “national races” or taingyintha has animated brutal conflict in Myanmar over who or what is “Rohingya.” But because the term is translated from Burmese inconsistently, and because its usage is contingent, its peculiar significance for political speech and action has been lost in work on Myanmar by scholars writing in English. Out of concern that Myanmar’s contemporary politics cannot be understood without reckoning with taingyintha, in this article I give national races their due. Adopting a genealogical method, I trace the episodic emergence of taingyintha from colonial times to the present. I examine attempts to order national races taxonomically, and to marry the taxonomy with a juridical project to dominate some people and elide others through a citizenship regime in which membership in a national race has surpassed other conditions for membership in the political community “Myanmar.” Consequently, people who reside in Myanmar but are collectively denied citizenship – like anyone identifying or identified as Rohingya – pursue claims to be taingyintha so as to rejoin the community. Ironically, the surpassing symbolic and juridical power of national races is for people denied civil and political rights at once their problem and their solution.
Specifies the origins, mechanisms and results of the autonomous power the state possesses in relation to the major power grouping of 'civil society'. The state is first defined, and two aspects of that definition, centrality and territoriality, are discussed in relation to 'despotic' and 'infrastructural' state power. Argues that the state is essentially an arena, a place, and that this is precisely the origin and mechanism of its autonomous powers. -after Author
In this article I consider several emergent trends in anthropology since the 1980s against a backdrop of the rise of neoliberalism as both an economic and a governmental formation. I consider first the turn to what I call “dark anthropology,” that is, anthropology that focuses on the harsh dimensions of social life (power, domination, inequality, and oppression), as well as on the subjective experience of these dimensions in the form of depression and hopelessness. I then consider a range of work that is explicitly or implicitly a reaction to this dark turn, under the rubric of “anthropologies of the good,” including studies of “the good life” and “happiness,” as well as studies of morality and ethics. Finally, I consider what may be thought of as a different kind of anthropology of the good, namely new directions in the anthropology of critique, resistance, and activism.
Civil Society as a conceptual category across different disciplines and ideological and theoretical frameworks has enjoyed an acceptability that no other concept has in the recent past. In response to what could, perhaps, be referred to as the post-euphoric versions of the civil society, scholars across theoretical dispositions began to look for the critical limits of posturing core issues of democracy through the prism of civil society. It is in this context that Partha Chatterjee has made one of the most important interventions by opposing the idea of civil society to that of political society. Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society critically unpacks the concept of political society, which was formulated as a response to the idea of civil society in a postcolonial context. The volume addresses the theoretical issues of political society through a number of detailed case studies from across India: Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Chattisgarh, Delhi and Maharashtra. These case studies, combined with a sharp focus on the concept of political society, provide those interested in democracy and its changing patterns in India with an indispensable collection of works, brought together in their common pursuit to highlight the limitations with different core concepts that Chatterjee has formulated. Centred around five themes the relation between the civil and the political; the role of middlemen and their impact on mobility of the subaltern groups; elites and leadership; the fragmentation and intra-subaltern conflicts and its implications for subaltern agency; and finally the idea of moral claims and moral community this volume re-frames issues of democracy and agency in India within a wider scope than has ever before been published, and gathers ideas from some of the foremost scholars in the field. The volume concludes with a rejoinder from Partha Chatterjee.
Mixed-blood urban Native peoples in Canada are profoundly affected by federal legislation that divides Aboriginal peoples into different legal categories. In this pioneering book, Bonita Lawrence reveals the ways in which mixed-blood urban Natives understand their identities and struggle to survive in a world that, more often than not, fails to recognize them. In "Real" Indians and Others Lawrence draws on the first-person accounts of thirty Toronto residents of Native heritage, as well as archival materials, sociological research, and her own urban Native heritage and experiences. She sheds light on the Canadian government's efforts to define Native identity through the years by means of the Indian Act and shows how policies such as residential schooling, loss of official Indian status, and adoption have affected Native identity. Lawrence looks at how Natives with "Indian status" react and respond to "nonstatus" Natives and how federally recognized Native peoples attempt to impose an identity on urban Natives. Drawing on her interviews with urban Natives, she describes the devastating loss of community that has resulted from identity legislation and how urban Native peoples have wrestled with their past and current identities. Lawrence also addresses the future and explores the forms of nation building that can reconcile the differences in experiences and distinct agendas of urban and reserve-based Native communities. Bonita Lawrence is an assistant professor of women's studies and Native studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. She recently co-edited (with Kim Anderson) Strong Women Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival.