Editorial Note: Political Anthropology and the Fabrics of Resistance (original) (raw)
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Resistance: Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology entry
http://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/resistance With images of protest and dissent widespread and frequently circulated in news broadcasts and social media posts, resistance to prevailing power structures seems to be an expected and regular feature of contemporary life. This entry explores how anthropology has linked these spectacular moments of resistance to broader social questions. It further explains how identifying a particular practice or process as a form of resistance is not always straightforward when broader context is thus taken into consideration. I do this by considering how resistance has appeared (or has been neglected) as a topic of study through the history of anthropology until the present day, and how prevailing theoretical frameworks and political contexts shaped what anthropologists made of resistance in different periods. The entry begins from early political anthropology’s avoidance of questions of conflict and social inequality and moves through paradigm-shifting moments in the discipline – in particular, post-colonial and Marxist analyses – whereby resistance and social change became central concerns. It then examines how anthropologists began to study ‘everyday resistance’ and to emphasize how ethnography can reveal many small and subtle acts as forms of resistance, and as linked to more obvious and public forms of protest. Questions of consciousness and intentionality in political practice that are raised by everyday struggles are then considered in connection to the problem of defining resistance. In light of a focus on unconscious practices or acts that simultaneously challenge certain power structures and reinforce or create different ones, resistance is framed as that which constitutes a subversive relationship to forms of domination or systems that reproduce inequality, but that is not necessarily intentional or outside of prevailing political structures. Additionally, I consider anthropologists’ changing relation to resistance – from one of neglect to the position of activist or engaged researcher – as shifting forms of media and communication highlight researchers’ involvement in shaping perceptions of more and less organized forms of political struggle.
Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1995
This essay traces the effects of what I call ethnographic refusal on a series of studies surrounding the subject of resistance. 1 I argue that many of the most influential studies of resistance are severely limited by the lack of an ethnographic perspective. Resistance studies in turn are meant to stand in for a great deal of interdisciplinary work being done these days within and across the social sciences, history, literature, cultural studies, and so forth. Ethnography of course means many things. Minimally, however, it has always meant the attempt to understand another life world using the self-as much of it as possible-as the instrument of knowing. As is by now widely known, ethnography has come under a great deal of internal criticism within anthropology over the past decade or so, but this minimal definition has not for the most part been challenged. Classically, this kind of understanding has been closely linked with field work, in which the whole self physically and in every other way enters the space of the world the researcher seeks to understand. Yet implicit in much of the recent discussions of ethnography is something I wish to make explicit here: that the ethnographic stance (as we may call it) is as much an intellectual (and moral) positionality, a constructive and interpretive mode, as it is a bodily process in space and time. Thus, in a recent useful discussion of "ethnography and the historical imagination," John and Jean Comaroff spend relatively little time on ethnography in the sense of field work but a great deal of time on ways of reading historical sources ethnographically, that is, partly as if they had been produced through field work (1992). What, then, is the ethnographic stance, whether based in field work or not? 1 An earlier and very different version of this essay was written for "The Historic Turn" Conference organized by Terrence McDonald for the Program in the Comparative Study of Social Transformations (CSST) at the University of Michigan. The extraordinarily high level of insightfulness and helpfulness of critical comments from my colleagues in CSST has by now become almost routine, and I wish to thank them collectively here. In addition, for close and detailed readings of the text, I wish to thank
Journal of Political Power, 2017
Lately, the concept of 'resistance' has gained considerable traction as a tool for critically exploring subaltern practices in relation to power. Few researchers, however, have elaborated on the inter-linkage of shifting forms of resistance; and above all, how acts of everyday resistance entangle with more organized and sometimes mass-based resistance activities. In this paper, these entanglements are analysed by taking into consideration the connections between articulations of resistance and technologies of power. Empirical observations from Cambodia are theorized in order to provide better theoretical tools for searching and investigating the inter-linkage between different resistance forms that contribute to social change. In addition, it is argued that modalities of power and its related resistance must be understood, or theorized, in relation to the concepts of 'agency' , 'selfreflexivity' and 'techniques of the self' .
Lately, the concept of ‘resistance’ has gained considerable traction as a tool for critically exploring subaltern practices in relation to power. Few researchers, however, have elaborated on the inter-linkage of shifting forms of resistance; and above all, how acts of everyday resistance entangle with more organized and sometimes mass-based resistance activities. In this paper, these entanglements are analysed by taking into consideration the connections between articulations of resistance and technologies of power. Empirical observations from Cambodia are theorized in order to provide better theoretical tools for searching and investigating the inter-linkage between different resistance forms that contribute to social change. In addition, it is argued that modalities of power and its related resistance must be understood, or theorized, in relation to the concepts of ‘agency’, ‘self reflexivity’ and ‘techniques of the self’.
Patterns and practices of everyday resistance: a view from below
Manchester University Press, 2017
This chapter develops the framework of resistance. It defines everyday resistance as the practices of individuals and collectives in a subordinated position to mitigate or deny the claims made by elites and the effects of domination, while advancing their own agenda. The chapter proposes a categorisation of two different practices following different levels of engagement against authority claims: claim-regarding acts (tax evasion against tax levy, mockery of authorities’ claims to deference) and self-regarding acts (subversion of peacebuilding vocabulary to further peasant agendas, taking over the delivery of social services and goods changing with it modes of social organisation and political order). This gradation improves the everyday framework by including different practices and going beyond the dichotomies in the resistance literature around intentionality, violence and non-violence, and direct and indirect practices.
Defining and Analyzing " Resistance " : Possible Entrances to the Study of Subversive Practices
This article explores the meaning of " resistance " and suggests a new path for " resistance studies, " which is an emerging and interdisciplinary field of the social sciences that is still relatively fragmented and heterogeneous. Resistance has often been connected with antisocial attitudes, destructiveness, reactionary or revolutionary ideologies, unusual and sudden explosions of violence, and emotional outbursts. However, we wish to add to this conceptualization by arguing that resistance also has the potential to be productive, plural and fluid, and integrated into everyday social life. The first major part of the article is devoted to discuss existing understandings of resistance with the aim of seeking to capture distinctive features and boundaries of this social phenomenon. Among other things, we will explore resistance in relation to other key concepts and related research fields. We then, in the article's second major part, propose a number of analytical categories and possible entrances aiming at inspire more in-depth studies of resistance.
Resistance Studies as an Academic Pursuit
Resistance is both a common and somewhat unusual concept. It appears often in political debates and the media. Members of various non-governmental organizations and social movements also frequently use resistance when they refer to their various activities. In spite of the significant growth regarding the use of resistance during recent years, the discussion about the meaning and content of the concept, the ways resistance activities can be understood, as well as their potential impact, et cetera, is still rather divided and underdeveloped within academia. Hence, in spite of offering a necessary addition to the earlier focus on 'power' within the social sciences, the rapidly growing field of resistance studies is still very much in its infancy. This article is an attempt to introduce some of our main ideas on researching resistance in a systematized and structured fashion. One of the main arguments put forward in the article is that what qualifies as resistance is very much dependent on context, as the aim of various resistance practices also varies very much; so, does its different articula-tions as well as the ability of various activities to challenge political, legal, economic, social and cultural structures in society—ultimately to achieve 'social change'.
(Undergraduate dissertation) Power in Resistance: Counter-conducts at the World Social Forum
Recent attempts to conceptualise global resistance remain bound by the binaries of power/resistance, government/freedom, and dissent/compliance which have guided much social and political thought. This project aims to make a series of interventions in orthodox accounts of the nature of resistance by utilising the Foucauldian concept of ‘counter-conducts’. I argue that the work of Michel Foucault offers novel insights not only into the workings of power, but the practices and mentalities of resistance. Such a perspective reveals the way in which government and freedom, and power and resistance, are mutually constitutive rather than oppositional. By focusing on the knowledges, practices and subjectivites evoked at the World Social Forum, the paper aims to reveal the way in which power and resistance are mutually constitutive and have the capacity both to challenge and bolster the regimes of power, at the same time.