political Anthropology Flashcards
Hansen & STepputat 2001
Languages of stateness - ( many dialects, just like regular languages)
practical - assertion of territorial sovereignty, control of knowledge, people, resources
Symbolic - institutionalisation of law, materialisation of state in rituals, signs, inscription of shared culture, history
- achieved via state apparatus - althusser
Configurational approach
Specific configurations of interdependent individuals, changing patterns of interdependencies
james scott (1998) seeing like the state
Society needs to be made legible for the state to surveil it :
- made known - surnames, censuses - philippines under spanish rule
- easily traceable - new cities by grod - ny, chicago
- must be understood - single official language - brittany subdued to french
Arendt on power and violence
- for her power never lies in the individual - being in power means being empowered by a group of individuals to act in their name
- violence is never capable of creating power, can only destroy it
- rule by sheer violence only comes into play when power is being lost
Stuart Mill’s first lesson on citizenship obedience
The will to power and willto submsission are interconnected
Micheal Mann - Dark Side of Democracy
8 thesis about murderous cleansing
- main and most radical argument that cleansing and democratization go hand in hand
- hostility when ethnicity replaces class
- two groups representing an ethnicity both claim land
- ordinary people brought into commiting cleansing
- a drive towards homogenization is an obvious side effect of democratization as who gets the most votes wins.
Appadurai - fear of incompleteness
By product of a need of national ethos, similar to gellner who claimed that every nation is based on an ethnic genius
- draws in douglas - the other becoming ‘dirt’ matter out of place as all that for douglas blurs the boundaries of moral and social taxonomies
- but before there an be an anxiety of incompleteness the bounderies need to be defined, the other created
Weber’s 4 main types of human action
Instrumentally rational , habitual, affectual, value rational
Mann - where power relations, or ethnic identities become internalised action becomes habitual, without rational. When hostility escalates it also becomes value rational and affective as one commits himself to goal
Grossman (1995)
Discusses the various means through which resistance to kill was overcome in soldiers during the vietnam war
- desensitisation - the creation of a affective, negative difference between oneself and the enemy - e.g language you get Japs, Krauks goots
- conditioning - development a reflexive quick shot, training in bery realistic setting - they become pavlovian dogs !
Michael Taussig - culture of evil
- joins together any rational calculations, will to submission and affective cultivation of the other
- Peruvian rubber company in on the verges of 19th/20th century
- although nobody held the monopoly of flogging, they kept whipping
- importance of culture of terror dominated by magical realismcreated through telling tales - indian as a composite of human and animal, tales of conspirancies and attacks
- told vis mucachos - indian guards trained by company being middle point between savage and civilised man
- the rubber station managers came to be obsessed by death
Gilsenan- against patron client relations
- became a concept applied quasi-universally, obscures deeper analysis
- Lebanon - maintenance of patriarchal loyalties, confessionalism and ‘symbolic’ power of sheiks work in favor of the lords upkeeping high levels of underdevelopment
- domination of social classes with use of other social classes - blockage and exploitation should not be framed p-c
Gilmore (1977)
Patronage south spain exasperates not mitigate class differences
- andalusia unlike boissevaian friendy web ( that is not patron client anymore?)
- patronage with fijos, and majeros keeps at distance working jornaleros
On corruption arguments
Common definition abuse of public office for private gain
- does not need to imply clear distinction between state and society ( which is a continuum ) just a more public and more private role and possibility of abuse of the former
- corruption being liminal both rather paradoxically proves the state an illusionary creation and upkeeps this illusion by aligning the public with the state and rest of societal relations with the private
- argument 1 : the existence of the term as such and the logic of it often makes those involved in it
schizophrenic - de sarden - they are both public/private - proves continuum
- argument 2 : yet the whole fact that it occurs means that there is an interest gap between state and society, the state is not governing well and/or keeping at a distance - bayart, laura’s mr.bose
kepferer
Nationalism has a religious aspect depicts its community as sacred
Abeles
Two rituals undertaken by president mitterand, one of interest to us, pilgramage to salute to commemorate his hiding place during war.
- a ‘national political ritual invented by protagonist’ , but during pentacost , when peter converted a group of people who accused apostoles whose tongues were fragmanted by the holy spirit of drunkness, pentacost marks new era of unleashing tongues
- adds contextual dramatization which produces snare for thought - aligns people i identification comparable to feeling of communitas
- along with making it sacred, the ritual at the same time feels intimate
Family dinner screened on TV
- national figures become a kind of sacred missionaries, only rather then delegated by God, are delagated by the imaginary nation.
Onto freeman
