anthropology and the political

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Anthropology and the Political

J e n n i f e r C u r t i s a n d J o n a t h a n S p e n c e r

1.11

As we put the last touches to this chapter,a wave of protests swept parts of North Africaand the Middle East, calling for the removal ofautocratic and corrupt regimes and the return ofa fully functioning democracy. What, we won-dered, would anthropologists have to contributeto making sense of these events? Introducing arecent Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute on the theme ‘Islam,Politics, Anthropology’, the editors briefly con-sider political science literature on an emergent‘post-Islamist’ trend in Muslim politics (by the

French scholars Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy).While acknowledging the usefulness of theseanalyses, the editors express some frustration withthis argument:

But in any case, the attention to state power and

to the formal politics of elections and political par-

ties is entirely too limited from an anthropological

perspective. Scholars such as Roy and Kepel fail to

take seriously modes and spaces of political action

beyond the purview of formal politics and the

state; it is precisely in these areas that anthropol-

ogy has been particularly skilled in applying its

tools. (Soares and Osella 2009: S10)

In itself the statement is unremarkable, an invoca-tion of disciplinary common sense: anthropolo-gists know that politics cannot be reduced to thearena of ‘formal politics and the state’, and theyknow that they must ‘take seriously’ manifesta-tions of the political that escape the political sci-entists’ narrow restrictions. The problem whichthis chapter addresses is that this particular bit ofcommon sense is not always shared by the peoplewe research. Rather, like naïve political scientists,people talk and act as if politics and the politicalreally can be restricted to a bounded area of life,

and may have difficulty acknowledging the ‘poli-tics’ that anthropologists claim to have discoveredin other areas of their collective life. In Egypt in2011, while nervous external commentatorsscoured events for evidence of Muslim Brotherhoodinvolvement, the protestors themselves (includingmembers of the Muslim Brotherhood) insistedtheir actions were focused on specifically politicalgoals (Roy 2011).

The last three decades have seen a dramaticreturn of politics and the political as central issuesof anthropological concern. Some of this can be

explained as a consequence of anthropologistsbeing forced to become more conscious of thepolitical context of their research, and especiallyof the potential political consequences of theirresearch and writings. But alongside this reflexiveconcern with engagement and its consequences,there has been an expansion of the category of thepolitical itself, which has become so diffuse andnebulous in recent usage that more or less every-thing might count as political for anthropologicalpurposes. The cost of this theoretical freedom istwofold: a loss of acuity in the analysis of actuallyexisting politics, and an inability to engage withour informants’ own ideas about what might and

might not count as political. This chapter will startby setting out the issue, using examples fromsome of the most celebrated ethnographies ofrecent years. It will then trace at least two separategenealogies − one from earlier traditions of politi-cal anthropology, the other from French post-structural theory − for the expanded sense of thepolitical that took root in anthropology at somepoint in the 1980s. Finally, we will briefly reviewexamples from our own research in NorthernIreland and Sri Lanka to illustrate what we see asthe ethnographic limitations of the new ubiquityof the political.

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135ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE POLITICAL

Let us start with one of the best and most influ-ential ethnographies of the 1990s, JamesFerguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine (1990). Thebook is a critical analysis of a development project

in Lesotho which, in Ferguson’s view, failed tomeet its own explicit goals, but neverthelesssucceeded in another unacknowledged goal, theexpansion of the state’s control over its moreperipheral citizens. The technocratic language ofdevelopment interventions like this, Fergusonargues, systematically masks the consequences ofdevelopment interventions while ‘depoliticizing’issues of inequality and powerlessness:

For while we have seen that ‘development’ projects

in Lesotho may end up working to expand the

power of the state, and while they claim to address

the problems of poverty and deprivation, in neither

guise does the ‘development’ industry allow itsrole to be formulated as political one. By uncom-

promisingly reducing poverty to a technical prob-

lem, and by promising technical solutions to the

sufferings of powerless and oppressed people,

the hegemonic problematic of ‘development’ is

the principal means through which the question of

poverty is de-politicized in the world today.

(Ferguson 1990: 256)

Earlier, in the Preface to the book, Fergusonglosses this act of depoliticization as ‘everywherewhisking political realities out of sight, all thewhile performing, almost unnoticed, its own

pre-eminently political operation of expandingbureaucratic state power’ (Ferguson 1990: xv).We do not wish to detract from Ferguson’s

central diagnosis: many development interven-tions do indeed attempt to translate potentiallycontentious political problems into the blandlanguage of technical solutions. But we do needto ask, what makes some realities, in his word,‘political’? Where will we find the real ‘politics’that is nullified by the ‘anti-politics machine’?The answer is not ethnographic: Ferguson’s bookis not about what people in Lesotho do or sayin the name of politics or the political: ‘politics’and ‘the political’ describe what ought to be hap-

pening − in this case arguments about distributive justice − were it not for the obfuscatory fog of thedevelopment apparatus. They are not, in thisanalysis at least, descriptors of what is actuallythere. If we have to attach a label to the idea ofpolitics here it would have to be ‘normative’.

This curious status of ‘politics’ and ‘the politi-cal’ is even more striking in a more recent −equally impressive and equally influential − book,Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005). Thebook, as is well known, challenges conventionalfeminist expectations about women and Islam, bycombining Foucauldian themes of ethical care

with Talal Asad’s critical perspective on liberalsecularism. Women active in Egyptian piety move-ments should not be dismissed as dupes of reli-gious patriarchy; rather, their actions can be

interpreted as expressions of a certain agency,albeit a kind of agency not directed towards thesort of goal Western feminists and secular liberalsmight deem to be desirable. This reading is obvi-ously controversial but it is carefully argued andfirmly based in Mahmood’s reflections on herethnographic encounters with pietist women.

Why, though, is the book entitled ‘The Politics of Piety’? What makes women’s prayer groups‘political’? The answer is provided in the closingpages of the book. The section in question isentitled ‘Politics in unusual places’:

The fact that the piety movement does not directly

engage the state and its juridical discourses, how-ever, should not lead us to think that it has no

direct political implications. To the extent that all

aspects of human life (whether they pertain to

family, education, worship, welfare, commercial

transactions, instances of birth and death, and on)

have been brought under the regulatory appara-

tuses of the nation-state, the piety movement’s

efforts to remake any of these activities will neces-

sarily have political consequences. (Mahmood

2005: 193)

Again, the anthropologists’ idea of the politicaltranscends the particularities of local context. It is

not a concept whose purchase on the world isdependent on local definitions and meanings.Indeed, it would be fair to imagine that somewomen in this piety movement would be shockedand dismayed to hear their activities described asin any way ‘political’, with all that that wouldimply about the challenge their activity mightpresent to the Egyptian powers-that-be. The rea-soning here is strangely circular and not entirelycoherent. The piety movement ‘does not directlyengage the state’ and therefore might be (mistak-enly) thought of as non-political. But in so far asthe modern state aspires to engage everything − allaspects of human life − so any effort to ‘remake’

anything within its vast ambition will have ‘politi-cal consequences’. Everything is potentially polit-ical and politics is ubiquitous and inescapable.

POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: HISTORY

AND GENEALOGY

How did we get to this position? Anthropologistsshow rare consensus in agreeing on 1940 asthe date when an explicit political anthropology




THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY136

was created. African Political Systems, edited byFortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940), is often char-acterized as the sub-discipline’s beginning (Kurtz2001; Vincent 2002). Articles in this Fortes and

Evans-Pritchard volume considered forms ofpolitical governance using categories of state andstateless, substituting kinship and lineage systemsfor state structures. As part of a functionalistapproach, this early political anthropology con-sidered formal properties of such systemssui generis.

A brief comparison with Ferguson andMahmood shows how much has changed. In hisPreface to the volume, Radcliffe-Brown definesthe political as follows:

The political organization of a society is that aspect

of the total organization which is concerned with

the control and regulation of physical force. This, itis suggested, provides for an objective study of

human societies by the methods of natural sci-

ence, the most satisfactory definition of the special

class of social phenomena to the investigation of

which this book is a contribution (Radcliffe-Brown

1940: xxiii).

Radcliffe-Brown famously dismissed the veryidea of the state as a real entity worthy ofstudy (1940: xxiii), while in the Introduction, theeditors relegated issues of indirect rule to a set of‘administrative’ rather than ‘anthropological’problems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940: 1).

For Mahmood and Ferguson, in the passagescited at least, the state is both real and malign,and most definitely worthy of study; ‘administra-tive problems’ are precisely the kinds of problemtheir anthropology aspires to address; and theidea of politics extends far beyond the realm ofphysical force into all areas of life. Moreover,neither Ferguson nor Mahmood is concernedwith the language of scientific neutrality, grap-pling instead with the tension generated betweentheir academic commitment to critique and theirpersonal commitment to a broadly progressivepolitics.

The one thing that unites them with the anthro-

pologists of the 1940s is the conviction that thestudy of politics must extend beyond the study ofthe state and the formal institutions of govern-ment. In this respect the versions of the politicalwith which we introduced this chapter can be seento be over-determined: at once inheritors of a longtradition of finding politics outside formal politi-cal structures, and drawing on a more recentradical genealogy which can be traced back tothe critical movements of the 1960s. But thisgenealogy itself has different branches. One comesfrom British cultural Marxism, as exemplified byRaymond Williams and E.P. Thompson; another

comes from the post-structural currents in Frenchsocial thought that developed out of the experi-ence of the events of 1968 in particular. Ofthese post-structural currents, the single most

influential figure is undoubtedly Michel Foucault.Anthropological interest in politics beyond thestate could be justified − in theory at least − onempirical grounds (anthropologists had oftenworked in settings where the modern state hadlittle presence or reach). The interests of Foucaultand his contemporaries, however, were born offrustration with the suffocating political structuresof De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, coupled with disil-lusion with traditional workers’ movements,whose radical potential, it was felt, had been neu-tralized by the post-World War II culture of con-sumerism. In other words, while older politicalanthropology had been more or less indifferent to

the state, Foucauldian influence was premised onpolitical hostility to the state as a potential agentof change. It is again worth noting in passing thatthis premise is not necessarily shared by thepeople whose politics anthropologists describeand interpret, a point to which we shall return(cf. Spencer 2007: 140−142).

In the 1960s, decolonization, revolutions, andnew social movements reoriented anthropologicalattention towards profound political changesand anthropologists began to reconsider pastapproaches in light of historical relationshipsbetween colonialism and anthropological practice.In this period of student movements and decolo-

nization, the Vietnam War and the Cold War,considerations of power became central to theanthropology of the political. This emerged as acommitment to an explicit study of power, whetheroperating in processes or structures, amongstgroups or individuals. Feminist anthropologistsalso took up the concept of power to correct priordepictions of non-Western societies as egalitarian(e.g. Friedl 1975). Here, anthropological holismwas targeted for glossing over inequalities andhierarchies within ‘primitive’ societies, and struc-tural functionalism was targeted for its erasuresof histories. Of this moment when Marxismand feminism converged to focus on power,

Ortner writes:

The two together made it difficult for many

anthropologists, myself included, to look at even

the simplest society ever again without seeing a

politics every bit as complex, and sometimes every

bit as oppressive, as those of capitalism and colo-

nialism. Moreover, as anthropologists of this per-

suasion began taking the historic turn, it seemed

impossible to understand the histories of these

societies, including (but not limited to) their histo-

ries under colonialism or capitalist penetration,

without understanding how those external forces





interacted with these internal politics. (Ortner

1995: 179)

In other words, the turn to power and the political

in British and US anthropology has roots in earlyanthropological approaches, in 1960s radical cri-tiques of the global political order, and in identitypolitics which had begun to identify the workingsof power and inequality in, to borrow Mahmood’sphrase, ‘all aspects of human life’.

FOUCAULT HISTORICIZED

In one popular version of the times, lifestyle andcounter culture had eclipsed traditional politicalissues. By calling everything ‘political’, young

protesters became less and less attuned to thosepolitical issues that had consumed them only ashort time before (Klein 1972: 331). This was themoment at which Foucault’s work started to betranslated into English and started to make itsmark across the humanities and social sciences inboth Britain and America. Initially promoted bythe anti-psychiatrists R.D. Laing and DavidCooper, Foucault was not at first particularlynoticed by anthropologists, although an earlyreviewer in Man concluded ‘Social anthropolo-gists should therefore be aware and beware ofFoucault’ (Loudon 1974). For a long time theyseem to have been neither aware nor beware. The

early 1970s translations of Foucault were reviewedin Man but not in any of the US mainstreamanthropology journals, but by the time of Geertz’s1978 review of Discipline and Punish (Geertz2010 [1978]), Foucault was beginning to establishhimself as a general intellectual presence in theUnited States, albeit still one of very marginalinterest to most anthropologists. Asad’s 1979Malinowski Lecture only references Foucault in afootnote, but his influence is apparent, not least inthe eruption of the term ‘discourse’ throughout theargument (Asad 1979; cf. Scott 2006: 271). Hisinfluence in anthropology mostly came mediated,for example through Stuart Hall and Birmingham

Cultural Studies (e.g. Comaroff 1985), or as partof the mélange of new critical voices from literarytheory invoked so breathlessly in Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). By 1993, it was suf-ficiently pervasive for Sahlins to use Foucault’sname in the title of a satirical pamphlet, Waiting

for Foucault , lampooning the new ‘power func-tionalism’ that seemed to have taken over anthro-pology in the previous decade (Sahlins 1993).

In a new history of Maoism in France, RichardWolin (2010) has reconstructed much of the origi-nal context within which Foucault, and others,turned from conventional Marxism towards the

politics of the everyday. Wolin describes how thestudent movement of 1968 was a defining moment,as intellectuals embraced a critique of post-warpolitics that rejected structuralism’s erasure of

agency and embraced Maoism, on the way torejecting the authoritarianism of the FrenchCommunist Party: a journey that in the course ofthe 1970s was to lead, somewhat counter-intui-tively, to renewed engagement with Enlightenmentconceptions of human rights. The influence of theChinese Cultural Revolution, though undoubtedlybased on an extraordinarily naïve and inaccurateunderstanding of contemporary events in China,paradoxically helped a whole generation of intel-lectuals and activists to free themselves from theshackles of the kind of authoritarian Marxismrepresented by the powerful but senescent FrenchCommunist Party (PCF). The telos of this particu-

lar French journey away from authoritarianMarxism, the moment of the so-called ‘nouveauxphilosophes’ that followed the translation ofSolzhenitsyn in the late 1970s, has had almost noimpact on social and political analysis outsideFrance, in stark contrast to the extraordinary influ-ence of Foucault, Derrida, and latterly Deleuzeand Guattari (Cusset 2008).

The French ‘children of Marx and Coca-Cola’(Wolin 2010: 50) embraced cultural politics. Post-war capitalism and the autocratic Gaullist statewere seen as invading and distorting every dimen-sion of life; the student movement, and move-ments that followed, therefore turned attention to

the politics of everyday life (see Debord 1994; deCerteau 1984; Lefebvre 1974). These new move-ments emphasized the politics of the personal,rejecting formal distinctions between public andprivate. Experiences of gender and sexuality,immigration and imprisonment became the focusfor social movements — and for social theory.Scholarship on social movements as sites ofpolitical practice emerged (e.g. Castells 1984;Touraine 1981). Touraine, Lefebvre and Ricoeurtook part in the student protests. Foucault wasteaching in Tunisia during 1968, where his ownstudents were engaged in their own high-stakespolitical struggle. Upon returning to France,

Foucault embraced activism at the new Universityof Vincennes. Wolin argues that, of French intel-lectuals, Foucault was most transformed by1968 – despite his own disappointment with themovement’s immediate outcome: Foucault’s sub-sequent activism with the Prison InformationGroup was part of an intellectual shift: from thedeath of man to a new humanism (Wolin 2010:178, 288−289).

This shift yielded key insights. Foucaultcame to argue that power is pervasive: ‘Poweris everywhere not because it embraces every-thing, but because it comes from everywhere’





(Foucault 1979: 63). Not confined to states andmarkets, power operates in a variety of sites –schools, factories, hospitals, prisons, and through-out the quotidian spaces of life. Foucault

characterizes his studies not as developing atheory of power, but an ‘analytics of power: thatis ... a definition of the specific domain formed byrelations of power, and toward a determination ofthe instruments that will make possible its analy-sis’ (Foucault 1979: 82). Politics in classical for-mulations mask the power relations that areactually happening: ‘right (not simply the laws butthe whole complex of apparatuses, institutions,and regulations responsible for their application)transmits and puts into motion relations that arenot relations of sovereignty, but of domination’(Foucault 1980: 95−96).

A crucial vehicle for the subtle workings

of power is discourse, which ‘can be both aninstrument and an effect of power .... Discoursetransmits and produces power; it reinforces it,but also undermines and exposes it, renders itfragile and makes it possible to thwart’ (Foucault1979: 100−101). Rather than a narrow sociolin-guistic definition of discourse, Foucault fusesrhetoric, practices and forms of knowledge,which function in the fashion of Gramscianhegemony. Power is simultaneously concealedand revealed in discursive instruments and effects.Analytics are then a political act that unmasksand demystifies power. For example, in Discipline

and Punish, Foucault (1977) demonstrates that

the legacy of the French Enlightenment is notfreedom, but techniques that produce, normalizeand regulate subjects: indeed, discipline theminto self-regulation (cf. Nord 1995 for a critiqueof this position). Foucault’s propositions havemethodological ramifications: analysis ‘shouldnot concern itself with the regulated and legiti-mate forms of power in their central locations’,but ‘with power at its extremities, in its ultimatedestinations, with those points where it becomescapillary, that is, in its more regional and localforms and institutions’ (1980: 96). Furthermore, inthese locations, resistance should be looked for‘as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light

power relations, locate their position, find outtheir points of application and the methods used’(Foucault 1982: 208). However, as Wolin (2010)concludes,

This notion of power as ubiquitous and its corollary

notion of dispersed and local resistance were by no

means Foucault’s discovery alone. Such precepts

were central to the ethos of post-1968 gauchisme.

In the aftermath of the May events, the student

activists became convinced that there was no such

thing as second-order, or lesser, political struggles.

(Wolin 2010: 328)

In other words, this powerful and enormouslyinfluential vision has to be seen as a product ofvery specific historical and political circum-stances, and its uncritical application to all cir-

cumstances at all times, as has happened in theyears since Foucault’s death, raises questionswhich we will briefly consider at the end of thischapter.

REINTERPRETING FOUCAULT

When Michel Foucault died in 1984, Hobart(1984) published an obituary in RAIN , predictingthat Foucault’s work would profoundly reshapeanthropology as a discipline. Foucault’s pers-pective on power was attractive for political

anthropology, because it resonated with priorimperatives to describe and analyse politicsbeyond the boundaries of states and to critiqueclassical political theory. Indeed, Vincent arguesthat the success of Foucauldian approaches led tothe demise of political anthropology as a distinctsub-discipline: ‘A concern with the mechanics ofpower and the relation of power to knowledge(derived primarily from the writings of MichelFoucault) halted the involution of disciplinary andsubfield specialization in its tracks’ (Vincent1996: 433). In this spirit, we would argue that anunderstanding of power loosely based onFoucault’s ideas came to stand in for any more

specific definition of politics, and the conceptionof politics itself was at once broadened (becauseanything could now be political) and reduced(because only power counted). In this way thestudy of the political became something thateveryone might be expected to pursue.

Foucault’s influence on anthropology has beenimmense. Geertz had started his early review ofFoucault with the pithy observation that ‘Foucault’sleading ideas are not in themselves all that com-plex; just unusually difficult to render plausible’(Geertz 2010 [1978]: 30). Yet, the generationof anthropologists setting out for the field asGeertz wrote, seem not to have experienced any

difficulty at all. On the one hand, anthropologistslike Paul Rabinow and James Faubion acted askey intermediaries in the process of editing andtranslation that made Foucault’s work available toAnglophone readers. On the other hand, by themid 1990s, simply naming Foucault, rather thanciting his work directly, was sufficient to invokethe broad orientation of his work (e.g. Yanagisakoand Delaney 1995: 16). The first wave of influ-ence came in the florescence of studies of powerand resistance, from the mid 1980s onward (e.g.,Comaroff 1985; Ong 1987; Scott 1985). Scepticswho shared Sahlins’ disdain for the implicit





functionalism in 1980s and 1990s resistance stud-ies, could instead turn to Foucault’s later work onethics for inspiration (e.g. Laidlaw 2002). Said’sOrientalism (1978), with its mix of humanistic

and Foucauldian theory, made all anthropologicalefforts at representations of other people poten-tially readable as politically shaped, and often,politically motivated. If nothing else, this darkimprimatur at least rendered anthropologicalknowledge powerful for someone − no small con-solation for the members of a small and rathermarginal intellectual community.

For an analytics of power to define the domainsand instruments of power, the analyst must dis-cern its workings beyond the conventional institu-tions of political theory. Anthropological workon this strand of Foucauldian insight convergedwith ideational understandings of hegemony to

problematize the study of political consciousnessand political practices. Some anthropologistsdetected subtler expressions of domination andresistance, using phenomenological examples ofreligious and ritual practice to diagnose power viaresistance (e.g. Comaroff 1985). Thus, embodi-ment became another early focus of Foucauldianenquiry. Others argued more vigorously foracknowledgement of actual, rather than false,consciousness. For example, Scott (1990) engageswith Foucault to develop the concept of infrapoli-tics, where resistance to power is a crucial, unac-knowledged form of politics. Indeed, ‘Under theconditions of tyranny and persecution in which

most historical subjects live, it is political life’(201). Here, the politics of resistance produce‘hidden transcripts’ which analysts may notreadily access, although subjects are consciousof them. A very similar mission to uncover the‘invisible’ politics of those excluded fromthe formal apparatus of government informed theearly work of the Subaltern Studies group inIndia (e.g. Guha 1997). But the convergence ofFoucauldian understanding of power with hegem-ony as ideology more often focused on how powerdoes not work at the level of consciousness. Forexample, Comaroff and Comaroff (1991) arguethat power ‘presents, or rather hides, itself in the

forms of everyday life ... these forms are noteasily questioned’ (1991: 22; cf. Foucault 1979:100−101). Here, discerning ‘power at its extremi-ties’ leads anthropologists back to the concept of‘everyday life’ as the site of politics (cf. Foucault1980: 96).

Studying power, and concomitant relations ofdomination and resistance, was firmly establishedas a substitute for studying politics by the 1990s.Insights of New Left anthropologists had beentransformed by 1980s critical theorists and becometheoretical and methodological common sense.The nexus of power, politics and everyday life

preoccupied sub-disciplines from linguistic (e.g.Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990) to medical anthro-pology (e.g. Scheper-Hughes 1992). Assumptionsabout the ubiquity of the political had hidden

themselves in the forms of anthropological every-day life, their unquestionability itself a manifesta-tion of some kind of disciplinary doxa.

POLITICS AS A CATEGORY OF PRACTICE

Why should any of this matter? By the late 1970spolitical anthropology seemed to have completelyrun out of steam. If it has now conquered all, whatis there to complain about? If we look at the kindsof topics that have occupied the anthropology ofthe political since the 1980s, the answer may

become more apparent. If the 1980s themselveswere the heyday of the anthropology of resistance,in which it became axiomatic to look for theworkings of power in any and every setting opento anthropological interpretation, work since the1980s has increasingly focused on the kinds ofentity and ideas that 1940s anthropologists thoughtempirically irrelevant. There is now a growing andincreasingly sophisticated anthropology of thestate (e.g. Das and Poole 2003; Fuller and Benei2001; Gupta 1995; Hansen and Stepputat 2001;Navarro-Yashin 2002), as well as an anthropologyof nationalism (Eriksen 2010), of citizenship (Ong1999, 2006), of political violence (Das 2007), of

human rights (Cowan, Dembour and Wilson2001), and of democracy (Bernard, Briquet andPels 2007; Paley 2009).

The influence of Foucault can be traced in atleast four rather different strands of the newanthropology of the political. One, followingSaid, focuses on anthropology as itself part ofa knowledge−power apparatus (Said 1989). Asecond, itself too ubiquitous to resist specific cita-tion, draws on the diffuse sense of power popular-ized by Foucault in his 1970s work. A thirddevelops and expands themes from Foucault’sshort essay on governmentality (e.g. Li 2007; cf.Foucault 1991). And a fourth has recently devel-

oped out of Foucault’s late attention to the domainof ethics and the care of the self (Faubion 2011;Mahmood 2005). Other theoretical influences inthe new anthropology of the political have includedPierre Bourdieu’s powerful synthesis of themesfrom Weber, Wittgenstein and phenomenology(Bourdieu 1990), as well as the rhizomic meta-phors of Foucault’s contemporaries Deleuzeand Guattari (1987). Most recently, the gnomicarguments of Giorgio Agamben (Agamben 1998),who builds on themes from Foucault, WalterBenjamin and the Nazi political theorist CarlSchmitt, have flooded the field, with Agamben’s





‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’ becoming the2000s equivalents of Foucault’s 1970s language ofpower/knowledge (Hansen and Stepputat 2005).Indeed, for some, Agamben’s work is an extreme

example of analytically equating power withpolitics (Rancière 2004:302).

Political anthropology in the 1940s had to lookoutside the institutional framework of Westernpolitics in order to justify its very existence. Ifthe Nuer, for example, lacked a centralized state,then it was up to the anthropologist to identifywhat for a Nuer might count as political. But ifan anthropologist now defines her object of studyas ‘the state’ or ‘citizenship’, then inevitably shehas to contend with the fact that the people sheis studying have their own, often quite specificideas, about what the state is or who might be acitizen. To take an old example from Spencer’s

doctoral research in Sri Lanka: a man sits at histeashop reading a virulently anti-Tamil pamphlet,written and published by a high-profile member ofthe government. Spencer comments, ‘I didn’tknow you were interested in politics.’ The manresponds, ‘This isn’t about politics. This is aboutthe national question.’ What is happening if thenational question − which is about to explode intocivil war − is declared ‘outside’ the political?What does it say about ‘politics’? And about‘the nation’? The answers to these questions havebeen explored elsewhere (Spencer 2008), but thequestions bear reflection.

In a recent article, Matei Candea explores simi-

lar questions. Corsican language activists workingon a bilingual classroom project are horrifiedwhen a foreign TV crew starts to ask teachersobviously political questions about possible inde-pendence for Corsica: ‘We are in a school,’ aneducation official explains, and such issues do notbelong in the classroom (Candea 2011: 310).Candea’s problem is that the space that might beconsidered political in much recent anthropologyhas expanded so much it is all but impossible todeal with statements like this. If we argue thatprotestations of being outside the political arealways and everywhere really expressions ofsome pre-existing politics, we lose the capacity to

make any kind of ethnographic sense of thosestatements. The point is not to veer in the oppositedirection, and treat all statements by our interlocu-tors as unarguably true; rather, it is to treatstatements about the limits of the political withthe same respect we would accord any otherethnographic statement.

So, in Candea’s example, making sense of thestatement involves a recapitulation of the historyof the republican tradition in French education, inwhich keeping the school as a space outside poli-tics allows for children to develop into politicallyactive citizens later in life. Or that is the theory

which informs a long history of schooling inFrance. (A second, somewhat better-known strand,buttresses the resistance to the appearance of anysign of religion in the undisturbed environment of

the classroom.) As a theory it is by no meansuncontested, even by Candea’s informants, buteven those who see other motives at work in theinitial example, themselves end up acknowledgingsome kind of legitimacy to the boundary betweenthe world of politics and the world of schooling.What we gain by taking seriously this insistenceon bounding off the political is the opportunity torecover the wider cultural logic within which it islocated. We can later return to the immediatepolitics of the initial situation if we want to, butour understanding will undoubtedly be enrichedby the refusal to take the easy path of denyingeven the possibility of a non-political space in the

first place.Another example from Sri Lanka, where, in

November 2008, three decades on and the war isending. Spencer is in the last stages of a two-yearcollaborative project, researching the role ofreligious organizations and religious leadersduring the long-running civil war. The project hasbeen based in the east of the island, an areadivided between Buddhists, Hindus, Muslimsand Christians. At this point, three members ofthe project team are in the town of Kattankudy, just south of Batticaloa, a town that prides itselfon being the ‘most’ Muslim place in Sri Lanka.Shahul Hasbullah from the University of

Peradeniya has arranged a meeting with repre-sentatives from the Kattankudy Federation ofMosques and Muslim Institutions. With BartKlem, another member of the research team,Hasbullah and Spencer had already toured thetown in the company of the Mosque FederationSecretary, starting with the bullet-marked walls atthe site of a 1990 massacre of men and boys by thesecessionist LTTE (Liberation Tigers of TamilEalam), and taking in both a demolished buildingby the beach, the headquarters of a controversialSufi sect, attacked and partially destroyed in dis-turbances that followed the death of the sect’sleader, a man called Pahilwan, and the large, new

central mosque being built by the followers ofanother Sufi leader, Rauf Mahlawi. Although con-flict between Tamil paramilitaries and Muslims isa big part of the local story, there is obviously noshortage of conflict within the Muslim communityitself (Klem 2011).

The Mosque Federation meets in its own,newly constructed, building in the middle of town.At first there are only a handful of people at themeeting, but gradually the room fills up: urbaneretired civil servants sit with bearded leadersof Jamaat-i-Islam, there is a local novelist, andan officer from the Muslim Peace Secretariat





(a spin-off from the 2002 Cease Fire Agreement).Eventually, there are about 20 participants, allmale (although women’s groups are also affiliatedto the Federation we are assured), and predomi-

nantly middle-aged. The conversation moves backand forth between English and Tamil. As theevening progresses, the atmosphere relaxes andthe comments become franker. The novelist startsus off: we have a solid organization and structurehere, but such organizations are absent in othertowns. Islam is a way of life and this organizationresponds to problems in an Islamic way. If there isa problem with other communities, people areselected to go to their areas and talk to their lead-ers and intellectuals. The Mosque Federationitself was founded in 1985 in order to express acommon opinion when there is a problem. Amongits accomplishments, we are told, is the observa-

tion of Fridays as public holidays withinKattankudy itself: ‘Even in political problems,this organization guides politicians. So when theycome to Kattankudy, they come here first.’

In Tamil areas, we are told, the key decisionsare made by armed groups. Here there are noarmed groups. To organize paramilitaries, oneman says, you need jungle, because in a city likethis people will give information to the police. Ifsomeone comes to search, there is no place to hidehere. Recently, the TMVP (the political party thathas grown out of a breakaway faction of theLTTE) has deliberately tried to provoke conflictwith Muslims in order to win influence in Tamil

areas. In national politics, extremist groups aregaining influence and questioning the rights ofMuslims. Someone quotes a recent interview withthe Head of the Army in which he had assertedthat Sri Lanka ‘belongs’ to the Sinhala people,while minorities are just ‘guests’ in the country. Inthis context, if there is any problem in Kattankudy,the national press will claim that Jihadi groups aregetting involved.

Towards the end of what has become a longdiscussion, the novelist returns to the theme ofpolitics. This town is the most Muslim town in thecountry, he says. There are no bars, no liquorstores, no video shops and no theatre. But there

are 60 mosques. This organization was the first ofits kind in the country − other areas followedafterwards. Earlier, the leaders of the communitywere trustees of the mosques, and these positionswere based on the kudi (matriclan) structure: eachkudi provided one trustee. Crucially, in this organ-ization there is no politics. It does not involvepoliticians. And that is why it is strong.

Consider the implications. The MosqueFederations are remarkable organizations thatcame into existence in Muslim parts of the islandduring the 30-year civil war. They are quite obvi-ously organized in direct response to the threat

posed by Tamil paramilitaries, and possibly byagents of the Sinhala-dominated state. Theirgrowth occurred in parallel with the emergence ofa major Muslim political party, but their members

are at pains to distance the Federation from thepoliticians. To simplify a much more complicatedstory: the claim to stand outside the world ofpolitics is a crucial precondition for the construc-tion of local solidarity. If the federations wereto be taken over by politics – as represented bythe workings of local big-men politicians − theycould not survive. That at least is their understand-ing of their dilemma.

Another example is drawn from Curtis’s field-work with the Belfast Pride Festival in NorthernIreland. On 31 July 2010, three clergymen andparishioners from their churches walked as anofficial contingent in the annual Belfast Pride

parade. The next day, at an ecumenical churchservice, seven members of the clergy took part.The officiating minister began his sermon by para-phrasing Gandhi, ‘Christ’s message was good −but those Christians sure are hard to take!’(Fieldnotes, 31/8/10). Addressing the gay andstraight congregants, he spoke of how Christianityhas been used to justify inequality, to oppose theenfranchisement of women, to preserve apartheidand slavery and to oppose interracial marriage.But he argued that even in Belfast, there havealways been other voices within Christianity. Hespoke of Christian abolitionists who barred slavetrading companies from Belfast’s port, and invoked

the eighteenth-century tradition of dissent inIreland.He then asked each congregant to regard the

stones they had been given when entering thechurch. He reminded them of stoning as punish-ment for those who transgressed sexual norms, inthe past and present. Invoking a Biblical exhorta-tion to ‘let he who is without sin cast the firststone’, he asked congregants to build relation-ships, rather than destroy them, and to lay theirstones in a circle on the altar. One by one, peoplefiled to the front and laid down the stones; later,when the minister asked congregants to embraceone another, I turned to an older man beside me, a

long-standing gay rights activist. He wept as heput his arms around me, and whispered, ‘HappyPride’.

This was the first religious service hosted by achurch as part of the festival. But Christianchurches had begun to engage with the festivaltwo years earlier, in 2008, joining an increasinglyheated public debate about sexuality andChristianity. While obviously ‘political’, thesedebates must also be considered with reference toreligious debates about the nature and role ofChristianity − because for the protagonists, thisdimension, religion itself, was a central priority.





Although these are not new debates, they wereprofoundly reshaped by the now-notorious IrisRobinson, Member of Parliament from NorthernIreland and wife of Peter Robinson, First Minister

of Northern Ireland. Mrs Robinson said muchabout homosexuality in the summer of 2008; mostof her commentary was justified with reference toher deeply held faith. These remarks became acatalyst for local discussion of the proper domainsof religion and politics – a perennially vexingissue in both of Ireland’s jurisdictions — andthese debates centred on how to practice religion,rather than simply communal politics.

After her infamous remarks, new voices joinedthe discussion of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexualand transgender) equality, including trade unionsand political parties that had previously beensilent, while long-standing opponents began to

modulate their critiques. Several groups expressedtheir support for gay rights by participating inBelfast’s annual Pride Festival; members ofChristian communities were also inspired to takepart. Most notably, a minister from All Souls Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church (Unitarian)became the first religious official to walk in theparade following the furore surrounding MrsRobinson.

Pride parades as a strategy to make LGBTQcommunities visible have been examined byanthropologists in particular cities like Vienna(Bunzl 2004), Madrid (Enguix 2009) and SanFrancisco (Howe 2001). Although Pride is an

international movement, parades are inflectedwith local significance and enmeshed in localconcerns. In Belfast, most LGBTQ civil rightsissues were settled law in 2008; civil partnershipswere legal, discrimination in services and employ-ment was illegal (with exemptions for religiousorganizations) and the new policing serviceliaised with local LGBTQ organizations. Broaderpolitical issues appeared ‘settled’ as well, withpower-sharing and devolution in place. Whatremained unsettled was how to practice faith inthe post-conflict era.

Until 2008, religious people were visible onlyin protests of the stereotypical hellfire and brim-

stone variety, beginning with the first parade in1991. At the first parade’s starting-point inDonegall Street, activists tried to tie a pink bal-loon to an elderly protester wearing a sandwichboard that announced the end of days. One ofthose organizers told me, ‘I thought, “He’s gonnadrop dead from the weight of that sandwich board.That’s a really good start to the first gay prideparade, killing some old man”’ (Interview,31/5/2010). At the 2010 festival, a protest repre-sentative also took part in an official event – anAmnesty International-sponsored discussion atthe Europa Hotel. Posing with other panellists

beneath the festival’s rainbow logo, an organizerremarked to him: ‘You know, this is the first timeI’ve met you when you weren’t shouting at me inthe street. I like you a lot better when you’re not

shouting at me.’ At the nexus of politics and reli-gion, it is how boundaries and their contents shiftthat is salient − as their makers define them.

In Belfast, Pride as a political project fits asoixante-huitard (1968-er) definition of a newsocial movement, directed to changing societyrather than the state (Touraine 1988). Here, dis-tinctions between religion and politics are nottactics subservient to broader political logics, butare integral to its existence. As both a cultural andpolitical project, Belfast Pride requires carefuldistinctions about how it is not ‘politics with acapital P’ (as some struggle to categorize theirefforts); certainly these distinctions have an instru-

mental effect, since they distance the festival fromparticular parties and stances, while permittingcollectivity around the dimension of sexualityrather than the usual political categories. However,interpreting this manoeuvre as mere pragmatismdismisses, and misses, the point: that multiplesubjectivities coexist alongside potent sharedexperiences amongst LGBTQ people. The exclu-sivities of nation and sect that dominate even thepower-sharing structures have created politicalparties and churches that cannot embrace, or insome instances acknowledge, the multiple proc-esses of subjectivity at work simultaneously forPride participants. Self-understanding emerges

from experiential distinctions of religion and poli-tics, as does the broader project of seeking accept-ance, interlocution and redress – within the domainof religion. In this instance, as in so many others,religion offers a redemption that actually existingpolitics no longer attempts to promise.

In many ways the spirit of this particular exam-ple is very close to the spirit of Mahmood’scelebrated account of the pietist movement. Thedifference is that our response to the commondesire to take other people’s religious commit-ments seriously allows us also to take seriouslythe boundary-work that the same people might doto keep religion free of what might be thought to

be the contaminating effect of the political.Similarly, our own political commitment to thoseideals of distributive justice, which informFerguson’s comments on the ‘political realities’that development interventions actively suppress,should not blind us to the fact that a ratherlarge amount of actually existing politics inNorthern Ireland addresses other issues – likesodomy in Iris Robinson’s case. This does notmake the politics less real. In the Kattankudy case,Soares and Osella’s dissatisfaction with politicalscientists’ concentration on parties and electionsand the state glosses over the fact that many





Muslims – both now and in the past – have beenconcerned about maintaining boundaries betweenreligious and political forms of authority (Hefner2004). This does not mean that they are therefore

trapped by the discourse of liberal secularism. Farfrom it – the unruly big-man politics of EasternSri Lanka, from which the Kattankudy MosqueFederation sought to distance itself, can be char-acterized in many ways, but textbook liberalismis not one of them.

These examples engage with ethnographicmeanings of ‘politics’. In an important set ofanalyses of nationalism and identity politics,Rogers Brubaker, drawing on Bourdieu, makes acrucial distinction between ‘categories of practice’and ‘categories of analysis’: the idea of the‘nation’ or of ‘identity’ is extremely important asa category of practice, and one task for the analyst

is to seek to understand the ways in which the ideaof the nation or the idea of identity becomes pro-duced and reproduced as a commonsense part ofpeople’s understanding of the world and theirplace in it (Brubaker 1996; Brubaker and Cooper2000). But, for this very reason, the same ideas areproblematic if unreflexively adopted as categoriesof analysis. In our examples we have treated‘politics’ and ‘the political’ as first and foremostcategories of practice: the delineation of ‘thepolitical’ emerges from, and produces, particularhistorical circumstances, particular cultural logics,and finally, particular subjectivities. As analysts,of course, we have our categories to approach

these issues; but the replacement of ethnographiccategories with analytical ones usually is accom-panied by some reasoned or even apologetic rec-ognition of the move. It is, perhaps, time foranthropologists to acknowledge the limits, as wellas the breadth, of their understanding of thepolitical.

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